Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 29, 1993 TAG: 9310290153
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Cigar smokers would have to pay almost 4 cents more for each stogie they buy, and the price of a 1.2-ounce tin of smokeless tobacco would jump by almost $1.
The nation's elderly would pay $11 more a month for Medicare's new drug benefits, and the wealthiest among them would have their Medicare premiums tripled.
Medicaid patients on welfare would pay $1 to get a prescription filled and $2 to go to the doctor under President Clinton's plan.
Those are among the wealth of details nestled in the fine print of Clinton's 1,342-page Health Security Plan.
Many features of the sweeping proposal for restructuring the $900 billion U.S. health system have been known and widely discussed for weeks - for example, Clinton's proposed 75-cent tax increase on cigarettes. The current 24-cent federal excise tax on each pack would climb to 99 cents on Oct. 1, 1994.
But Clinton's health reforms would exact a price from every other form of tobacco, too. Small cigars, now taxed at one-tenth of a penny, would be hit with a 3.9-cent levy.
Big, fancy cigars - the kind Clinton himself likes to chew on but not light up - would be taxed at up to 12.4 cents apiece.
There would be a 35-fold increase in the tax on smokeless tobacco. The 2.7-cent tax on those 1.2-ounce tins would climb to 96.4 cents.
Roll-your-own tobacco would be taxed for the first time (at $12.50 a pound), and higher levies would be slapped on pipe tobacco and cigarette papers, too.
In another area, if families fudged their income to qualify for subsidies on their health premiums, states could hit them with penalties of $2,000 - or three times more than the amount of their ill-gotten discount.
The draft of the plan that surfaced in September would have let nursing home residents on Medicaid keep $12,000 in assets, up from $2,000. The actual bill simply says states "may" liberalize the eligibility criteria that much.
The president would force people who want to sue a doctor or hospital for malpractice to first submit an affidavit with a written report from a "qualified medical specialist" certifying that the suit had merit.
Elderly and well to do? Medicare beneficiaries with modified adjusted gross incomes above $90,000 for a single person and $115,000 for couples would have to pay 75 percent of the cost of their Part B coverage.
Now, all Medicare recipients are charged only about 25 percent of the value of those Part B benefits, which pay doctor bills and other out-of-hospital expenses.
Several million employees would no longer be able to pay for health benefits, including their insurance premiums, with pre-tax dollars starting in 1997. The Clinton plan would remove health benefits from "cafeteria" benefit plans.
Big companies with cafeteria plans often offer workers a menu of benefits from which they can choose, from health coverage to life insurance to child care.
Ken Feltman, executive director of the Employers Council on Flexible Compensation, predicted, "Since medical benefits are the cornerstone and normally the most expensive benefit, many employers would just close down their cafeteria plan."
Keywords:
INFOLINE
by CNB