a Democratic tax on taxes

This won't help health care costs or competition!

From the editorialists of the WSJ on "ObamaCare"...

Liberals still think the bill didn't raise taxes enough. So they've cooked up a virtuoso new scheme. A phalanx of powerful committee Chairmen—including Henry Waxman (House Commerce), Max Baucus (Senate Finance) and Sander Levin (Ways and Means)—want to tax the taxes that the health insurance industry already pays.

Among the hundreds of ObamaCare mandates is an accounting requirement that insurers spend between 80% and 85% of premium revenue on patient care, as opposed to administrative expenses, profits, etc.—known in the trade as a "medical loss ratio." Federal regulators and state insurance commissioners are now groping their way toward an explicit definition of..."patient care"...

Democrats prefer an extremely narrow definition...The committee Chairmen recently wrote a letter to federal regulators meant to "clarify" their "legislative intent." They now say that when they wrote a clause "excluding Federal and State taxes and licensing or regulatory fees" from the definition of medical loss, what they really meant is that federal and state taxes should be part of it...

But insurers have little to no control over the taxes they pay, which is why they were originally deducted from the denominator. Taxes can't be sent to Washington and at the same time count as "resources" that should be devoted to patient care...

Isn't health reform grand?