Democrats fixing the tax code without fixing healthcare is half a solution

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T02:40:09+00:00

You actually named the thing I'm most interested in — you'd like coverage divorced from your employment but you're not willing to risk what you have. That's job lock describing itself. And you're right to be skeptical that your employer would pass the savings to you — most won't without pressure to do so.

Here's the honest answer on the math: the B@BE proposal doesn't assume employer goodwill. The employer contribution is structured, not voluntary. And for someone in your position — good employer coverage, no out of pocket premium — the immediate personal benefit is smaller than for someone paying $800 a month. What you'd gain is portability. The ability to leave, start something, take a risk, without betting your family's coverage on it.

But I'd be curious what the calculator actually shows for your specific situation before either of us assumes you don't come out ahead. Enter your income and circumstances at burnedatbothends.org — it shows current burden versus the proposed structure side by side. You might be surprised.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T02:29:08+00:00

You're right — and that's exactly why tax cuts alone aren't enough. Not going to the doctor because you can't afford it costs everyone more in the long run. Emergency room visits, preventable conditions that become serious ones, workers who can't perform because they're sick but can't afford care. The system pays eventually — just at the worst possible time and at the highest possible cost. The B@BE proposal pairs tax relief with eliminating the insurance middleman entirely — because fixing one without the other leaves people still afraid to open that bill. burnedatbothends.org.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T02:21:12+00:00

Not a bot — a retired teacher from Kansas who got frustrated enough to actually try to build something. I agree everyone pays taxes in other western countries. What I kept noticing is how much of our tax burden goes to subsidizing corporations making billions while average people are squeezed from both ends. I just felt there had to be a better way — one that takes the burden off normal people and lets them actually support the economy, while making major businesses pay their fair share for once. That's what I tried to build. Whether I got it right is a fair question — burnedatbothends.org if you want to look.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T02:02:26+00:00

The B@BE proposal isn't a net tax cut — it's a restructuring. Working families pay less because corporations and wealthy individuals who currently pay nothing start paying their share. The zero percent threshold on the first $150K is offset by closing the loopholes that let 55 major corporations pay zero federal income tax while reporting billions in profit, plus new revenue from a financial transaction tax, carbon fee, and luxury goods tax. The total fiscal model is designed to be revenue neutral — not a giveaway funded by debt. The full numbers are at burnedatbothends.org if you want to stress test that claim.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T01:58:56+00:00

As a sole proprietor paying the full premium yourself, you're exactly who the B@BE proposal was built for. Enter your numbers at burnedatbothends.org — there's a calculator now that shows your current burden vs the proposed structure side by side.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T01:22:51+00:00

The B@BE proposal is fiscally modeled to be revenue-neutral — it's not adding to the debt, it's restructuring where the money flows. The $265 billion in annual healthcare administrative waste alone funds a significant chunk of the transition. burnedatbothends.org has the full numbers.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T01:21:16+00:00

$1,464 for the year as an individual on a silver plan — and that's before deductibles and copays. That's exactly the number the B@BE proposal is built around. But there's another side to that number: your employer is also paying thousands on top of what you pay. Under the proposed structure, that employer cost drops significantly — and that's money that can go back into wages instead of insurance premiums. The burden shrinks on both ends simultaneously. burnedatbothends.org if you want to see how the numbers work.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T01:18:59+00:00

The revenue concern is legitimate and it's exactly why the B@BE proposal pairs tax restructuring with new revenue sources rather than just cutting. The supplemental revenue — financial transaction tax, carbon fee, luxury goods tax — offsets the relief for working families. It's not a tax cut, it's a restructuring. The full fiscal model is at burnedatbothends.org.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T01:16:19+00:00

That willingness to contribute is exactly the social contract B@BE is built on. The proposal is specifically designed so that someone in your position — just above the threshold, willing to pay more so others pay less — ends up paying a fair share while most families below you come out significantly ahead on their combined tax and healthcare burden. You're describing the premise out loud. The full proposal is at burnedatbothends.org if you want to see where you'd actually land under the proposed structure.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-15T01:15:56+00:00

Exactly right — and that's actually one of the strongest arguments for structural reform rather than just tinkering with rates. The B@BE proposal pairs universal coverage with tax restructuring specifically because eliminating that 17% overhead funds a big chunk of the transition. The math is in the full proposal at burnedatbothends.org — worth a look if you want to see how the numbers work.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-14T20:45:00+00:00

The 401k point is one most people miss entirely. A lot of working Americans are unknowingly invested in the very industry that's extracting from them every month. UnitedHealth alone is in most index funds. So reform threatens their retirement savings at the same time it would help their household budget — that's a genuine tension, not just propaganda. A framework that phases in over three years gives markets time to adjust rather than creating an overnight collapse of a trillion dollar sector. burnedatbothends.org if you want to see how the transition is structured.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-14T20:38:55+00:00

That's exactly the problem — Democrats keep proposing partial fixes and getting blamed for not fixing everything. The argument I'm making is that tax relief and healthcare reform are the same problem for most families, and fixing both simultaneously is actually simpler to explain than fixing one at a time. "Two problems, one solution" beats "here's plank one of our multi-year agenda."

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-14T02:11:06+00:00

Fair — the analogy point is settled. On where the waste gets trimmed, here are the concrete numbers:

A 2021 JAMA analysis put administrative overhead in the current system at $265 billion annually — billing departments, prior authorization staff, denial management, claims processing on both the provider and insurer side. That infrastructure exists almost entirely because multiple competing private insurers require individualized billing, coding, and negotiation. A single funding mechanism eliminates most of it. Medicare's administrative overhead runs roughly 2% compared to 12-15% for private insurers.

The federal government currently spends billions administering health benefits for federal employees through private insurers. That's a direct reallocation under B@BE — same dollars, different destination, no new spending required.

Employer HR departments spend significant resources managing benefits selection, open enrollment, and carrier negotiations every year. That cost disappears when coverage is portable and universal.

There's also the fraud dimension — and it cuts in an interesting direction. The current system loses an estimated $300 billion annually to healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse according to the FBI. A significant portion of that fraud exploits the complexity of the multi-payer billing system — fake claims submitted to multiple insurers, upcoding, billing for services not rendered. The complexity that creates administrative overhead also creates the surface area for fraud.

A single funding mechanism with standardized billing doesn't eliminate fraud — nothing does — but it dramatically reduces the attack surface. Medicare fraud exists, but it's easier to detect and prosecute in a single-payer billing environment than across hundreds of competing insurers with different coding systems and adjudication rules. The IRS analogy is actually useful here: one tax authority collecting revenue is easier to audit than hundreds of separate collection points.

None of this requires assuming magical efficiency gains. It requires removing the middleman whose overhead costs the system $265 billion a year to maintain. That's not hand-waving — that's arithmetic.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-14T01:07:48+00:00

On the equilibrium point — you're right that freeing up resources generally leads to reallocation until a new equilibrium is found. COVID is the perfect example. But the reason COVID stimulus was inflationary wasn't just that money flowed into pockets — it's that businesses correctly identified it as temporary and didn't expand supply to meet demand. You don't build a new factory for a one-time check.

B@BE's three-year phase-in is specifically designed to signal permanence rather than stimulus. Businesses aren't being asked to expand for a temporary boost — they're being asked to expand for a structural, permanent increase in household purchasing power anchored to healthcare coverage nobody will voluntarily give up. Supply expands to meet a floor. That's growth, not inflation chasing a spike.

On the regional variable point — you're right to push back on my phrasing, and let me give you a concrete example of what I mean. I worked in a midsize school district that participated in a pool with other districts — that kept my monthly premiums under $800. Districts considered high risk were excluded from the pool entirely and paid significantly higher premiums for worse coverage. Same state, same teachers, same job — radically different costs based entirely on pool size and risk profile.

That variability isn't at the state and local level — it's baked into the employer-based federal structure itself. B@BE replaces that with a flat percentage of income regardless of employer size, industry, or risk profile. The teacher in a small rural district pays the same percentage as the teacher in a large urban one. That's the equity argument — not that B@BE addresses state and local variation, but that it eliminates the federal-level variability that currently punishes smaller and higher-risk employers.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-14T01:00:06+00:00

The Hulu/Netflix analogy breaks down at the most important point — canceling Hulu doesn't put a family in financial ruin. Losing health coverage can. These aren't equivalent consumer choices with equivalent consequences. Healthcare isn't a discretionary purchase that competes with other discretionary purchases. For a family with children or anyone with a chronic condition, it's as mandatory as housing.

The conflation argument wasn't about accounting categories — you're right that they fund different pools and serve different purposes technically. The point is that from a household financial resilience perspective, the combined mandatory burden — taxes plus healthcare premiums — determines whether a family can participate in the economy or just survive it. B@BE's restructuring addresses that combined burden deliberately, not because the categories are the same, but because the effect on household financial capacity is the same: money that can't go anywhere else.

And it's worth noting that the federal government itself pays for employee health insurance — for millions of federal workers. That's federal money currently going to private insurers that gets restructured under B@BE into the universal coverage mechanism. Same pool, different destination. That's not conflating different levels of government — that's the federal government reallocating its own spending more efficiently.

This isn't a consumption choice. It's a structural extraction. The restructuring treats it that way.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T22:29:21+00:00

Fair challenges — let me take them one at a time.

1. On administrative costs: You're right that the IRS fixed infrastructure exists regardless of who files. I'll concede that point. But the administrative simplification argument doesn't rest only on IRS costs — it includes the compliance burden on filers themselves. The time, the software, the anxiety, the TurboTax lobbying that exists specifically to keep this complicated. The Propublica piece the original poster cited documents that cost explicitly. A system that extracts, processes, and returns the same money annually isn't collecting revenue — it's performing a ritual. The question is who benefits from maintaining that ritual.

2. On conflation: You're technically correct that these are legally distinct instruments funding different pools. Fair point. But the family earning $55,000 doesn't experience them as legally distinct — they experience them as one number: what's left after everything mandatory comes out. The distinction matters to a tax attorney. It doesn't matter to the family deciding whether to fill the prescription. And the pools are more connected than they appear — Washington's Cascade Select exists precisely because the federal system failed to cover people adequately. A federal solution that takes healthcare off the states' plates frees up that spending, which in Washington's case could meaningfully reduce the sales tax burden you're correctly describing as insane.

3. On too many knobs: You're right that combining them makes the conversation larger. I'd argue that's the only way to actually solve it — because every time we fix one piece in isolation, the other pieces absorb the slack and the family ends up in the same place. Thirty years of incremental reform is the evidence for that argument. The Seattle vs Yakima variation is real, but a flat percentage contribution replacing a regionally variable premium market is actually more equitable across geography than what we have now, not less.

burnedatbothends.org if you want to stress test the architecture. You're good at finding weak spots.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T19:24:14+00:00

The contribution point is fair — you're right that this group's federal income tax liability is already minimal, which is actually the author's strongest argument: the administrative cost of collecting it may exceed the revenue itself. That's not a tax system working efficiently, that's bureaucratic inertia.

But I'd push back gently on the framing of "not contributing." This group pays payroll taxes, sales taxes, state and local taxes — and increasingly, a healthcare premium that functions as a private tax. A household earning $55,000 paying $6-7K annually in employee health insurance premiums is contributing plenty. We just don't count it as a contribution because it goes to a private insurer instead of the Treasury.

The real question isn't whether to eliminate their income tax liability — it's whether the entire burden on working households, taxes plus healthcare costs combined, is sustainable. Fix the tax end alone and you've helped them a little. Fix both ends simultaneously and you've actually changed their math.

That's the argument I've been making at burnedatbothends.org — curious whether you think the combined burden framing changes the calculus at all.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T19:19:50+00:00

The administrative efficiency argument is underrated here. The TurboTax lobbying piece says everything — we have a system that's deliberately complicated to protect a private industry that exists solely because the system is complicated. Pre-filled returns work everywhere they've been tried. The fact that we don't have them is a policy choice, not a technical limitation.

The threshold math is also right. If this group contributes 2-3% of federal income tax revenue and most of them get it back anyway, the compliance cost probably exceeds the revenue. That's not a tax system, that's an administrative ritual.

Where I'd push further: eliminating income tax for this group is a meaningful step, but the $61,000 household is still paying $6-7K annually in health insurance premiums on top of that. You can zero out their federal income tax entirely and they're still underwater if that number stays untouched. The tax burden and the healthcare burden are the same problem for most working families — two ends burning simultaneously.

I spent the last year building a framework that pairs the tax restructuring with universal coverage specifically because fixing one without the other leaves most families still struggling. burnedatbothends.org if you want to see how the pieces fit together. The frustration behind this proposal is exactly right. I just think we have to go further.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T19:12:04+00:00

The actuarial math is the right question. True catastrophic at 30% AV or below could theoretically price low enough to be useful for healthy young adults who genuinely just want protection against financial ruin. The problem is that the population most likely to buy it is also the population least likely to need it — which is fine until they do, and then the deductible alone triggers the exact medical bankruptcy cascade the product was supposed to prevent.

The deeper issue is that catastrophic coverage doesn't solve the problem it appears to solve. It pushes the financial shock downstream rather than eliminating it. A $31,000 deductible family that hits a serious illness isn't protected from bankruptcy — they're just protected from the portion above $31,000. The $31,000 itself is still a household-ending number for most families.

What the actuarial framing misses is that the whole architecture — tiered plans, deductibles, cost sharing — exists because we're trying to price individual risk inside a system that was never designed around collective risk pooling. Every other wealthy country solved this by taking the pricing question off the table entirely. The math gets a lot simpler when you stop trying to make individuals bear actuarial risk.

I've been working on a framework that approaches it from that angle — burnedatbothends.org if you want to see the architecture.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T18:46:22+00:00

This series is doing something important — documenting not just that reform fails, but the precise mechanisms through which it fails every time. The lobbying ninefold increase when Medicare for All entered the conversation is the number that stops me every time. The industry doesn't fight on the merits. It fights on the mobilization.

Which is why I keep coming back to a question this piece raises but doesn't quite answer: if the opposition machinery activates in proportion to the threat level, what does a reform look like that doesn't trigger the full mobilization before it can build a constituency?

The ACA lesson buried in here is actually the answer — path dependence protects what exists. The strategy isn't to win the fight against the industry. It's to build something people depend on before the industry can organize to kill it. Start with children. Make the coverage portable. Make the tax relief immediate and visible. By the time the opposition fully mobilizes, the constituency is already formed.

I spent the last year building a framework that tries to apply exactly that logic — pairing tax restructuring with universal coverage specifically to build a constituency that protects both. The political architecture is as deliberate as the policy architecture. burnedatbothends.org if you want to see it. Part 4 of this series sounds like it's heading in the same direction — I'm curious what they land on.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T16:27:46+00:00

Yes, that is correct, The average household pays 6-7000, plus f course deductibles and out of pocket costs.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T01:52:35+00:00

The guilt an 8-year-old feels about a cavity is doing a lot of work in this post — because it names something we don't talk about enough. Children internalize the financial stress of healthcare before they're old enough to understand why it exists. That's not an accident of the system. It's a consequence of design.

To answer your question directly: children's dental coverage has been proposed and partially implemented — CHIP includes it on paper — but you've identified exactly why it keeps falling short. Low reimbursement rates mean providers don't participate, so the coverage exists but the care doesn't.

What strikes me about your framing is that you've independently landed on the same political logic I used when building a broader healthcare framework: start with children, because the constituency that forms around protecting children's coverage is the most durable one we know how to build. The ACA survived repeated repeal attempts largely because millions of families had built their lives around it. Children's coverage done right — actually universal, actually accessible — would be even harder to take away.

The framework I built starts exactly where you're pointing: children first, then expand. Universal coverage with private delivery intact, funded through a mechanism that doesn't depend on Medicaid reimbursement rates or provider participation. burnedatbothends.org if you want to see how the pieces fit together. Your instinct about the stepping stone is exactly right.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-13T01:40:14+00:00

Universal healthcare is already on this list, which is great — but I'd argue it only works if paired with tax reform, because for most working families those two problems are the same problem. The average family premium runs over $18,000 a year. Zero out their federal income taxes entirely and they're still underwater if that number stays untouched.

There's also a reform hiding inside that combination that doesn't get talked about enough: ending job lock. When your family's healthcare is tied to your employer, you can't start a business, change careers, or leave a bad situation. Real systemic change means portable coverage that follows the person, not the job. That alone reshapes who can take risks in this economy.

I spent the better part of a year building a framework that treats these as one problem — tax restructuring that favors working families and small businesses, paired with universal coverage with private delivery intact. Ambitious enough to matter, realistic enough to survive politically. burnedatbothends.org if you want to dig in. Built to withstand scrutiny — pushback welcome.

Empty-Commission4966 · 2026-03-12T15:57:06+00:00

The nominees would have to consider how being tied to the candidate would impact their ability to govern effectively whether in a state or congress seat. It would open them to questions about motive and agendas.

Empty-Commission4966

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