If you want people to consume less of something, tax it.Keeping this economic logic in mind, you can see the direction of the Bush administration’s plan for the American health care system. He intends to tax it.Like so many tax initiatives this president puts forward, his health care tax wouldn’t fall on the well-insured or the well-off. It would be imposed on those who are sick or poor or have spent so much paying for a chronic illness or disability that they’ve wound up in a nursing home and on Medicaid.Understand that President George W. Bush does not call the health care proposals included in his budget a health tax. (It would be more accurate, anyway, to call them a sickness tax.) He plans, for example, for the Veterans Administration to collect a $250 annual “enrollment fee” from vets who want to get health care from the government. And he would add to that a $15 monthly co-payment for prescriptions, more than doubling the current $7 co-pay. Based on the administration’s estimates, veterans’ groups believe that more than 200,000 vets would leave the VA health system because of the higher costs. If you want people to consume less of something, tax it.
