http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/george-w-bush-healthcare-plan-2007-103635.html#.Uywb08JOVjo
George W. Bush found the solution to America's health-care crisis seven years ago. Too bad nobody listened.
Unfortunately, Bush’s Healthcare plan went nowhere in Congress. Democrats had zero partisan incentive to cooperate with Bush, given the possibility that a Democratic President would be elected in 2008. Rep. Pete Stark (D., Calif.), then chairman of the key Health Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, pronounced it “dead on arrival.”
Even more impressively, the Joint Committee on Taxation—the government agency responsible for the CBO’s estimates of the impact of tax legislation—projected that the Bush proposal would reduce the deficit by $334 billion from 2008 to 2017, and by trillions more in later decades, because the tax deduction would grow at the rate of inflation, whereas the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance isn’t capped by law, and grows along with overall, and higher, health inflation.