You may have heard that Senator Ted Cruz is carried on his wife’s Goldman Sachs-provided health insurance policy. What you probably haven’t heard is that the policy cost $40,543 in 2009. Austin Frakt used publicly available data to estimate the size of the tax-subsidy Cruz receives from the federal government for his insurance.
Plugging and chugging with these numbers (formula here), I compute that the “tax price” of Senator Cruz’s health insurance is about 64%. In other words about 36% of his health insurance premium cost would be government tax revenue if employer-sponsored health insurance were taxed like wages. That’s $14,595.
A typical, able-bodied, adult Medicaid beneficiary costs government $3,000. In other words, Senator Cruz’s health insurance tax subsidy could fund Medicaid coverage for almost five such adults.
Sen. Cruz hasn’t done anything to “earn” this tax subsidy beyond agreeing to be married to his spouse. If he were unemployed and had no income, he’d still get the roughly $14,595 in subsidies through lower tax payments for his wife. Because both he and his wife have high six-figure to seven-figure incomes, they don’t really need this tax assistance, but it is particularly galling that Sen. Cruz’s spokeswoman said that his health plan “comes at no cost to the taxpayer.” It actually comes at the expense of paying for five typical adult Medicaid plans.
And then we can begin calculating the damage Goldman Sachs did to ordinary Americans with their role in the housing bubble and the financial collapse.
