Yesterday I received something in the mail from Harvard’s flexible splending plan administrator describing some changes that will take effect next year. Primarily, over-the-counter medications (such as aspirin, cough medicine, and allergy-relief pills) will no longer be covered as a result of the health care overhaul implemented by, as FoxNews would say, “the democrats.”<\/p>\n
Now, my understanding of this program was that it was supposed to improve (or provide) coverage for many who are not covered adequately, but I didn’t realize it was supposed to take away coverage from those already PAYING for their health plans through payroll deductions. Still, I can accept that. I mean, the way\u00a0flexible spending\u00a0works is that you have money withdrawn from your paycheck each payperiod and you can use that money pre-tax to purchase your over-the-counter medications. That’s like a 30% discount. And considering 30% off a $3.00 bottle of generic aspirin is only 90 cents…I am willing to let the government keep that little bit of savings to help those in need.<\/p>\n
But then I read further into the document and it said that Band-Aids and saline solution will continue to be covered. Huh? Why do they need to complicate things? Why can’t they just say “No over-the-counter” drugs are included. Whenever they allow exceptions like this\u00a0it just leads to confusion. And why such random exceptions like Band-Aids and saline solution?\u00a0 Exclude all or nothing. No inbetweens, please.<\/p>\n
It’s just like taxes. I have no problem paying taxes. Generally speaking, I think we’re undertaxed and with proper taxes (and a necessary reduction in state and federal employees), we wouldn’t be having so many issues with failing infrastructure (come on…3 bridges in Massachusetts crumbling just this past week alone? an under-funded\u00a0public transit system in the red every single year?).<\/p>\n
So why in the hell can’t we just have a flat income\u00a0tax? I’ve read reports that over 50% of the population doesn’t pay any tax at all because they make less than the allowable thershold. That means less than half of the country is paying for entire country’s upkeep. That’s just wrong.<\/p>\n
Instead of all these insane tax credits and tricks that benefit some and not others (homeowners can claim mortgage interest in their taxes while renters can’t claim their rent), people receive tax credits for having kids while they should be paying MORE since they’re using more\u00a0of the programs), people stop contributing to social security after they reach a certain threshold (somewhere around $100,000) meanshile social security is in such dire straits everbody should continue contributing to it? That money would do a lot of good.<\/p>\n
Long story short….I say charge everybody\u00a0the same flat tax rate for all income: salary, investments, capital gains. The tax forms would be a helluva lot easier to read. And either allow ALL over-the-counter drugs to be approved for flexible, or none at all.<\/p>\n
Why do we insist on complicating things that just don’t have to be?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I received something in the mail from Harvard’s flexible splending plan administrator describing some changes that will take effect next year. Primarily, over-the-counter medications (such as aspirin, cough medicine, and allergy-relief pills) will no longer be covered as a result of the health care overhaul implemented by, as FoxNews would say, “the democrats.” Now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2540,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions\/2540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}