House Financial Services begins its mark-up of H.R. 3200, the Affordable Health Choices Act, at 9 a.m. today.

Energy and Commerce starts at 2 p.m.

Have you read it yet?

Have the committee members?

We’ll cut to the chase by taking a detour around the 1,000-plus pages.

• Heritage Foundation, “Income Tax Surtax Should Not Fund Government Health Care Expansion“
• Tax Foundation, “House Leadership’s Health Care Plan Pushes Top Tax Rates Over 50% in 39 States“
• Washington Post editorial, “The Deep Pockets Mirage“:

THERE IS a serious case to be made that the U.S. income tax system should become more progressive. The average rate paid by the top 1 percent of households shrank from 33 percent in 1986 to about 23 percent in 2006. At the same time, the share of adjusted gross income claimed by that highest-earning sliver of American society doubled, from 11 percent to 22 percent. So, in principle, higher taxes for the well-heeled could make sense — as part of a broader rationalization of the unduly complex tax code.

But there is no case to be made for the House Democratic majority’s proposal to fund health-care legislation through an ad hoc income tax surcharge for top-earning households. The new surtax would hit individual households earning $350,000 and above. It would start at 1 percent, bumping up to 1.5 percent at $500,000 in income and to 5.4 percent at $1 million. The new levy would begin in 2011 and is supposed to raise $540 billion over 10 years, about half the projected cost of health-care reform. The rest of the money would come from reduced spending on Medicare and Medicaid — though the surtax for the lower two categories would jump by a percentage point each in 2013 unless the Office of Management and Budget determines that the rest of the bill has saved more than $150 billion.