On the recordMarch 19, 2010
I want to talk for a few minutes again on the health care bill that's pending that has millions of Americans upset, near panicked. Obviously, we have health care problems in America. I don't know how to answer some of the people who have preexisting conditions with their kids, who have lost their jobs or different challenges, but you don't need to have this type of bill to address those. We've offered solutions from trying to limit defensive medicine to doing it across State lines. Clearly, we are going to have to spend some money to try to address the preexisting conditions and catastrophic, but you could do that and still keep the private sector by having some form of reinsurance that may or may not be subsidized to the individual or through the government in a pooling process. But there are ways to address this other than making the government the de facto center of the entire health care industry. I want to talk about four particular things. One is that in this is one of the most weird economic terms: 'unearned income.' There is a tax increase on unearned income. Unearned income is income you've already been taxed for once. If you put your money in an investment fund or you put it in buildings or in annuities, you've been taxed on that. It's not unearned income. And for years, we've encouraged people to save so our Social Security system didn't go broke, so our Medicare system didn't go broke.…
Source
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