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NorthernGent -> RE: Obama offers universal health care plan (6/1/2007 12:44:59 AM)
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Merc, L&M:
In Britian, all the tax is put into a treasury pot and used to pay for services. National health contributions are not the only tax payments used to fund the NHS. It's a huge operation and at times it needs huge sums of investment to maintain a decent service. To fund this, tax is redirected from elsewhere. So, comparing national health insurance contributions in Britain with national insurance paid by the likes of your business, Merc, is not meaningful.
You would need to look at the total tax paid by your business and compare that with a similar sized British business. Then have a look at the services the tax payer gets for that money. Ellen will be a better person to speak with on this one. She runs her own business and can tell you about other business tax which ultimately is channelled into maintaining the NHS. Other taxes include property taxes, capital gains tax.etc. It would be interesting to see the comparison because the general perception over here is one of the US having a lower tax burden. According to the attached link, the total business tax paid as a % of GDP in 2003 is as follows:
Britain 9.9%
Germany 10.1%
The Netherlands 9.7%
France 14.4%
The US 7.3%
Ireland 7.2%
Assuming your health insurance payments are not included in this, then I would imagine this would take you up to around 8%.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/business/3186662.stm
I wouldn't argue that small and medium businesses have to pay for this. Dampening business enterprise and innovation is not the way to go, but when you have 1% of people owing 40% of the wealth, and the likes of IBM receiving huge tax breaks, then there is some slack there from which to fund a health service.
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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth
Enron and other well published scandals are more a result of personal greed played out within the Corporation and routinely involve decimal point moving accountants. Getting caught most often involves the fraudulent tax returns.
Slightly off topic, but from what I have read, Enron was the tip of the iceberg. It was well known in the business community that Enron and many like them were producing meaningless figures. Pressure groups were going to your politicians and trying to do something about it, but they were thwarted at every turn becasue the same politicians were receiving funding from some of the businesses and consultants involved. Yeah, it comes down to greed, status, power etc, but there were a lot of people involved in the likes of Enron - from CEOs to auditors to consultants to politicians.
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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth
The percentage you provided, 20% of the employee's salary for small companies, is that the cost to the corporation regardless of corporate income? Would that be specifically allocated to the health care program, the equivalent of the employer paid portion of the US Social Security Program? Is that the only tax incurred by the employer that is not profit driven?
Ultimately, national health contributions are not the only business taxes allocated to the health programme. It's not as simple as saying here is a tax payment and here is the associated service. As said, it all goes into a treasury pot, and decisions are made on where the money is needed most. The best way of explaining it is to say the national health insurance contributions are a minmimum tax payment, and then the government decides the level of other funding to be directed to the NHS.
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ORIGINAL: Mercnbeth
As a small company, for discussion purposes defined as gross income of $4 Million and 10 employees with an annual payroll of $500k, what would be the assessment for the health coverage? At present the total cost for health benefits, medical/dental/eye-care, for this model would be $15 - 24k depending on coverage type and deductibles to be paid by the employee. At 20% of the payroll, that cost would balloon to $200k.
If Ellen is around, she'll be able to give you a good insight. I'm an industry accountant and, in the private sector, I've only worked for large organisations, so my knowledge is limited with small businesses.
It comes back to someone footing the bill for the 45 million people who don't have health insurance. This is inevitable if people want a universal health service.
I wouldn't recommend crippling small to medium businesses. My assessment from limited knowledge is that US taxpayers and small to medium businesses are already paying for a national health service - the money is simply being used to fund your top multinationals. Some of those being subsidised include Boeing, IBM, General Electric, Motorola and General Motors - much of it labelled as 'job creation schemes' at a time when some of these businesses are outsourcing.
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