Did you know that if McCain is elected you will have to pay income tax on the value of the medical insurance that your employer gives you? Worse still, he is offering a tax break for people who pay their own insurance, BUT only $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families.
Let's say you have a family of four. Your insurance policy costs would be at least $1,500-2,500 per month under a self-pay plan, which cost more than employer group plans. So, you pay $18,000 -$30,000 per year for insurance, and you get to deduct only $5,000 of that. If you paid $25,000 for you insurance, you would be out of pocket $20,000 per year. This is FAR WORSE than the current system, where if you are self employed you can deduct 100% of you medical insurance costs.
So, if you're not self employed, you would stick with your Employer's plan. Employer plans for a family of four have a value of $900-$1,500 per month totaling 10,800-$18,000 per year. Surprise! On April 15th, you owe tax on all of that as INCOME to you. Say your bracket is 25%, and the value of your Employer medical plan is $14,000. You will OWE THE IRS an additional $3,500, and that's ON TOP of whatever monthly premium you already pay to your employer for your insurance.
Many analysts say that McCain's new rules would encourage employers to stop offering health benefits. If that happened, then far fewer Americans would be insured than are insured today, because what family of four can afford $18,000-$30,000 out of pocket per year for self-pay health insurance?
Furthermore, McCain's plan does not require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions of people who self-pay their insurance. People under employer group plans have all of their pre-existing conditions covered. This is a hugely unfair aspect of the current system. Insurance companies can afford to cover the pre-existing conditions of the much larger pool of people with group insurance, but they refuse to pay the pre-existing conditions on the smaller pool of self-pay customers. They have been allowed to price gouge the self-pay customers, which is a form of market manipulation that should be illegal.
So let's say one of your kids had diabetes and you have high blood pressure, then your employer stops offering insurance. You now have to buy your own, but you and your child are INELIGIBLE due to pre-existing conditions. Oh, yeah, they will let you buy the insurance, but you can't use it for any pre-existing condition until you have paid on time every month for two years. And you know what happens at one year and 11 months? You get a letter saying your policy has been cancelled. I have many patients this has happened to.
McCain's plan SUCKS.
It does nothing to help middle class working Americans afford or obtain medical insurance. In fact, it makes the current system WORSE.
Vaccinate Your Kids--or Else
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But wouldn't most medical experts say there's only one side to the issue: that you should vaccinate you child?
Vaccines are very important, and they've played a tremendous role in getting rid of diseases. But the reasons why some parents are not vaccinating is they don't feel like they're being told what the risks are with vaccines. Because doctors feel that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks, they don't take the time or have the time to go over what the very small risks are. Because some parents feel unsure about it and they want to be well informed and fully educated, a lot of them are just choosing not to vaccinate because no one will give them a straight answer on what the small risks are.
What are the risks?
Some vaccines have a lot more potential to cause reactions than other vaccines. There's a whole ranking. Some parents will specifically choose to skip one or two vaccines that are well-known to cause reactions. Interestingly, the hepatitis B vaccine is one of the vacccines that's known to be fairly reactive and cause a severe side effect more often than a lot of the other vaccines.
What kind of severe side effects?
Some of the biggest side effects, especially for adults and teenagers, is there's a lot of potential neurological side effects: numbness and weakness in their arms and legs. Now these kinds of reactions almost never occur in infants and young children, mainly the teens and the adults. Can I tell you the exact number? I can't. It's not made public.
What makes the hepatitis B vaccine more risky?
I have no idea. When you look at the ingredients, there's not much in there that we can really pinpoint.
At what age is the hepatitis B vaccine typically given?
It's usually given to newborn babies in the hospital and then two more times during the first year of life. The parents in this [case] probably elected to skip the vaccine when their children were young.
What's the rationale for giving the hepatitis B vaccine to babies?
The rationale is that we want to get a whole generation protected from this disease and the easiest time to make sure it gets done is during the infant years. It's much harder to get a teenager into the office for a three-round series of shots, as the state of Maryland is finding.
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