Fox News recently put up an online calculator that purports to show individuals their personal share of the cost of health care reform. CBO, in its final score of the reform bills, put the total gross cost of the new coverage provisions at $938 billion from 2010 to 2019. The calculator is designed to show you how much of that $938 billion you are personally responsible for. It's an interesting idea, but the calculator suffers from so many flaws that its numbers are essentially meaningless.

The Tax Foundation explained that the calculator “throw[s] numbers around with no context whatsoever.” It points out a number of other flaws, such as that the “calculator is designed specifically to show costs over a specific time period - ten years, but you wouldn't know that unless you read the detailed description on the top of the page,” that “the calculator isn't estimating your specific personal share of the cost - it's putting you into one of seven income groups and then giving you the average cost for people in that group” which gives “the ridiculous and nonsensical statement that 'Taxpayers earning $55,000 pay 18% of the all (sic) taxes collected.)' What was meant is 'Taxpayers earning between $50,000 and $99,999 pay 18% of all [federal income] taxes collected' and it'd be nice if the calculator made this a bit clearer.”

But the Foundation pointed out that there were far more significant issues than these “aesthetic” ones, such as that the calculator ignores that “the federal government has many sources of revenue beyond the individual income tax,” and that “less than half comes from the individual income tax.” The Tax Foundation further pointed out:

But all of these issues are relatively minor compared to the biggest flaw of all. Health care reform is unique among recent major legislative initiatives in that it is fully paid for with new taxes and spending cuts. Yes, it will cost $938 billion over ten years, but the bill includes a series of tax increases and spending cuts which exceed that $938 billion slightly, for a net deficit reduction. While it's true there's considerable controversy over whether the revenue provisions raise enough money to pay for the bill (see this interesting calculator from the Heritage Foundation here, for example) the fact remains that the new spending is, at the very least, mostly paid for with new taxes and spending cuts. The tax increases are a hodgepodge of provisions, including an excise tax on “Cadillac” health plans, a general fee levied on insurance providers, reductions in allowable spending under HSAs, an increase in the Medicare payroll tax for high-income earners, the infamous “tanning tax,” and so forth. The spending cuts are largely to Medicare Advantage programs.

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For all these reasons, Fox's calculator can't be taken seriously. Its calculations are basically nonsense, and I hope that it dies a quiet death before its numbers are widely repeated without any context. There are many valid reasons to oppose (or support) the health care reform that passed last March, and it's important that we continue to have that debate without resorting to nonsensical numbers.