It's hard to decide what is more exasperating about the new Coalition to Protect Quality Health
Care: the assumption that envy should determine tax policy or the sheer intellectual dishonesty of its arguments.
What gives the Massachusetts Hospital Association and fellow members expertise in tax policy?
The coalition is opposing Gov. Paul Cellucci's ballot question to restore the 5 percent income tax rate and a separate question to give a tax credit for turnpike tolls and auto excises. If they pass, money needed to "stabilize" the state's health care system will "not be available," the coalition claimed.
To take such a claim seriously you have to believe that health care is first in line for cuts in appropriations and last in line for increases, which is far from the truth.
Health care competes with all other needs of the state. The Legislature decides what taxes to impose and how to spend the money. In the past five years, the Legislature has even had trouble spending the state's ever growing surplus and has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars of it to capital projects.
In other words, people who want to spend more on health care simply couldn't make a convincing case to legislators.
One of the coalition handbills claims the excise and toll tax credit "gives the biggest tax break to those with the most luxurious cars." This is far from a plea for more spending on health care. And what cars do doctors and hospital administrators drive, pray tell?
The document notes that Massachusetts' debt is the third highest of any state, and asserts that this means
"that the state does not have a true budget 'surplus.' "
Oh boy. Here the coalition is relying on a verbal trick it hopes will slip right by the financially
unsophisticated. Does the group think Massachusetts voters just fell off the turnip truck? The budget of the state, like the budget of any family, deals with annual income and expenses without regard to assets and liabilities. A family earning $40,000 a year and spending $38,000 has a true surplus for the year even though it may owe a mortgage on the house.
Maybe the state isn't devoting enough to health care, but voters can't appropriate money. The hospitals have to make their case to the Legislature.
The state's tax revenues for several years have exceeded projections. The overrun for the quarter just ended could be twice the first fiscal-year cost of Cellucci's proposal (which would be a half-year) -- in other words, the 2001 fiscal year tax cut is already paid for!
The tax rate rollback would take three years and eventually return $1.2 billion a year to taxpayers, a little more than 5 percent of last year's total revenue. We support it wholeheartedly as a needed removal of temptation from politicians, as enforcement of promises made in 1989-1990 and as a boost to the state's competitive position. It is quite affordable. The coalition should be ignored.