Panel To Eye Health Tax Breaks

The Senate Finance Committee plans to hold a hearing Thursday on federal health benefits tax incentives.

Witnesses scheduled to appear include Jonathan Gruber, associate head of the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kate Baicker, a health economics professor at Harvard University’s public health school.

Gruber has written academic articles contending that the existing tax breaks for employer-sponsored health coverage are an inefficient tool for getting employers to cover the uninsured.

In a 2004 paper, Gruber estimated that “public insurance costs the government only between $1.17 and $1.33 per dollar of insurance value provided, [and] tax policies cost the government between $2.36 and $12.98 per dollar of insurance value provided.”