Ask yourselves, "How would the other side (Republicans) pay for health care reform?"
Some have proposed getting rid of social program such as Medicaid, Medicare and CHIP. I suppose if you could show there's a better, more economical way to insurer the poor, senior citizens or children, I'd be all for it. As it stands, even the leading House bill on health care reform would lower the FPL standard for Medicaid eligibility and eliminate CHIP while implimenting cost-cutting (savings) measure in Medicare. So, all three social health care programs would be affected by health care legistlation. But what Republicans are not saying is they'd take a backdoor approach to funding their health care reform legistlation.
Simply put, instead of imposing a tax on any one individual, company or industry, they'd instead tax the "cadillac policy" people would purchase...those so-called "premium policies".
The Senate Finance Committee bill would tax health insurance plans costing more than $8,000 annually for individuals and $21,000 for families, although those numbers could rise.
And who can afford such policies? The rich, the wealthy, the financially afluent.
And yet they'd have us all believe there's class warfare taking place in the health care reform debate. Republicans won't impose a tax on the middle-class because they need their anger to help put down any form of health care legistlation proposed by the Democrats no matter how comprehensive it might be, but most important they need the middle-class vote to take power back from the Democrats. And certainly one way to do that is to continue to through these wild ideas out there of "redistribution of wealth" and "class warfare" when the truth is they intend to tax the rich just as the Democrats. Only they'll do it indirectly.
I've made mention of this intentional "slight of hand" economics before in recent posts. If you step back, take off the partisian blinders for just a moment and read what's really being proposed by both sides you'll see they're both doing it - using the rich to pay for health care reform. Only one side is being direct about it while the other side is not. Republicans won't tax you, the wealthy, directly based on your income because they can then get away with saying, "We're not going after your money." But what they will do instead is go after the things rich people buy - in this case high-end insurance policies - so they can still say, "We didn't go after your money, but they (the Democrats) did."
So, no. Republicans may not be proposing to tax the profits of the rich directly, but they will dip into their pocketbooks and go after the things they buy instead.