NIce.
“Allow individuals to fully deduct health insurance premium payments from their tax returns under the current tax system. Businesses are allowed to take these deductions so why wouldn’t Congress allow individuals the same exemptions?”
Interesting.
It has bothered me for a ling time that individuals couldn’t deduct their premiums. I’m glad he’s thinking about that. There are so many things that he sees that I just don’t expect a billionaire to even be aware of.
That is nothing new. Unless your healthcare premiums are deducted from your gross pay (in which they aren’t taxed anyway), you can already deduct the cost of your health insurance premiums. See the last bulleted item here: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc502.html
As it stands now, you can only deduct the medical expenses that are in excess of 7.5% of AGI. So if your AGI is $100k and you had medical expenses of $7501, you would only be able to apply $1 towards your deductions. And then all of your other deductions would have to add up to an amount greater than the standard deduction before you would see a reduction in taxes owed.
A great deal of out of pocket medical costs have to be borne before it affects the taxes we owe. What is really needed is to lower that 7.5% threshold.
Whoops, I did not notice the word “fully.” We have always been able to deduct them subject to a 7.5% threshold, and it appears that premiums will be separate from the rest of the expenses and not subject to the threshold.