I don’t know why this has not been all over the press yet… but read this piece from The Hill.
This is backed up by the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation’sevaluation of the McCain and Barack Obama health plans:
* Reform the tax code to eliminate the exclusion of the value of health insurance plans offered by employers from workers’ taxable income.
How does this work? The Hill again:
The value of the typical plan provided by an employer to a family is $12,106, of which the employer pays $8,824, and the worker pays the remaining $3,282. The median household income is $44,389, which places most American families in the 15 percent income tax bracket.
McCain wants to add the employer’s cost — an additional $8,824 — to that middle class family’s income, then tax it. The hit to the average family is 15 percent of the McCain-added income — $1,323 more in income taxes.
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This comparison was published last June and the information has been available for a while… the press, however, has pretty much ignored it and McCain has hidden this information from his web site and and his promotional material.