Baucus Plan: 'The D.C. Mind' Gone Mad

The inane convolutions (and complexity) of Baucus' plan demonstrates that 'the D.C. mind' is disconnected from anything resembling reality.

The proposal would make it considerably more expensive for employers to hire workers from lower-income families than workers from higher-income backgrounds to do the same job. As a result, it would distort hiring decisions. Employers would have strong incentives to tilt hiring toward people who have a spouse with a good income (or have health coverage through a family member), teenagers whose parents make a decent living, and people without children (since the eligibility limit for the subsidies in the new health insurance exchanges will increase with family size). Low-income women with children in one-earner families would be particularly disadvantaged.

And the plan pre-supposes that mom-and-pop employers have fleets of bureaucrats, just like any D.C. agency:

*Employers would need to maintain ongoing data exchange with state health insurance exchanges. Worker turnover would further complicate matters, and likely lead employers to dispute various billing charges from the exchanges.

*In addition, as CBO warns in its analysis, employers may not know how much they owe until they receive bills from the exchange, which could create uncertainty and make financial planning more difficult for them.

Sure. Mom and Pop can hire a full-time data-tracker (who better be very well-paid) just to keep their compliance in line.

HT: Memeorandum