An article in yesterday's Boston Globe, "Health tax may wallop towns," reports, for example:
Framingham has dozens of employees enrolled in two of its family plans at annual premiums of $40,475 or $39,150, far in excess of the threshold. For individual plans, the excise tax threshold is $10,200, and Framingham has scores of employees enrolled in plans with annual premiums of $16,275 or $14,500.
If the new tax were in effect today, Framingham would probably face an additional expense of $4,660 to $5,190 for every employee in the family plans, and $1,720 to $2,430 for each employee on an individual plan.
They follow with numerous other examples.
There's something wrong here, in many ways. Who is bilking whom with that kind of rate? Who's in charge in Framingham and the other cities that are mentioned? I work for a small company in Massachusetts, and my top-of-the-line family PPO plan costs me and my company about $14,000 per year--less than half of what the municipalities are paying. So I took keyboard in hand and wrote a letter to the Globe, with a copy to the reporter:
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