“You may be wondering how President Bush’s health insurance plan would affect you, the taxpayer. The answer depends on whether you have medical coverage, where you get it, and how much it costs. My family, for example, gets health insurance through my wife’s employer, and it costs … actually, I have no idea what it costs. That’s one of the problems Bush wants to address by eliminating the tax code’s bias in favor of employer-provided medical coverage, which distorts the insurance market, promotes insecurity, and raises health care costs. This bias was created more or less by accident. During World War II, businesses competing to attract scarce workers got around wage and price controls by offering health insurance instead of higher pay. In 1943 the Internal Revenue Service decided not to count this increasingly popular fringe benefit as taxable income, a policy codified by Congress in 1954. … The upshot is that most Americans get medical coverage through their employers, which is a strange situation when you think about it. People do not, as a rule, expect their employers to pay for their car insurance, their life insurance, or their homeowner’s insurance. Why should employers pay for their health insurance?” (01/31/07)