New First Focus Report Indicates Tax Credits would be Detrimental to Children and Families
A new report released by First Focus has found that President Bush’s tax proposal would be severely detrimental to American children and families, because it significantly underfunds family coverage in comparison to individual coverage.
Authored by renowned health care expert Stan Dorn, the report finds that the plan would put dependent children and families at a significant risk, potentially facing coverage loses and reduced benefits:
“These proposals would provide much shallower subsidies for family coverage than for worker-only insurance, risking coverage losses and less generous benefits for dependents. Providing less assistance to women and children seems an ironic result from a proposal advanced in the context of SCHIP reauthorization,” the report concludes.
The report compliments an earlier paper by James Capretta, a First Focus Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who found in an article published in Tax Notes on May 21, 2007, that, “Adoption of the president’s [plan] would thus likely induce the breakup of many family insurance arrangements… To keep parents and children enrolled in the same insurance plan, the standard deduction thresholds should more closely reflect today’s marketplace….”
