There is]a relationship between wages and health care costs – a fact which few deny. [. . .][This is] moot where the excise tax is concerned. The excise tax is not designed to find wasteful or excessive spending. It’s just designed to reduce what health insurance spends. Heck, you could reduce that to zero tomorrow. Just outlaw health insurance! The remaining costs would be covered by people out of their own pockets – to the extent they could afford care.

That’s what the excise tax does: it shifts cost back to individuals. So if Baicker and Chandra are right, some employees will work 2.4% more hours. But that income will be taxed. Instead of receiving a dollar’s worth of coverage, they’ll work to earn that $1 and only have seventy cents or so left after taxes. That’s a net loss of roughly 30%, and they’ll have to work more hours to get it.

Such a deal.

(Emphasis supplied.) It is true of course that the excise tax will increase the taxes paid by wealthy people who carry health insurance above the excise tax limit. But it also will either reduce the health insurance benefit offered to some middle class workers OR increase the taxes paid by middle class workers, more and more over time.

That means, even if you believe the 1:1 transfer theory of the excise tax proponents, it means less after tax income for middle class workers. If we must have the excise tax, it should be means tested.

Speaking for me only