Thread: Good News! IRS Says Cheapest ObamaCare Plan Will Only Cost You $20,000 Per Year!

BY GARY P JACKSON | JUNE 3, 2013 · 3:00 PM
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Good News! IRS Says Cheapest ObamaCare Plan Will Only Cost You $20,000 Per Year!


By Gary P Jackson
On the campaign trail back in 2008 candidate Barack Obama repeatedly claimed his “health care plan” would reduce the insurance premium of every family by $2500 a year:




Of course, he lied!


A few days ago Avik Roy writing for Forbes noted: [emphasis mine]

Rate Shock: In California, Obamacare To Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums By 64-146%

Last week, the state of California claimed that its version of Obamacare’s health insurance exchange would actually reduce premiums. “These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard,” boasted Peter Lee, executive director of the California exchange. But the data that Lee released tells a different story: Obamacare, in fact, will increase individual-market premiums in California by as much as 146 percent.

One of the most serious flaws with Obamacare is that its blizzard of regulations and mandates drives up the cost of insurance for people who buy it on their own.
This problem will be especially acute when the law’s main provisions kick in on January 1, 2014, leading many to worry about health insurance “rate shock.

More here.

Now this from CNS News: [emphasis mine]

In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS.

The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumptions to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.

“The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000,” the regulation says.

Bronze will be the lowest tier health-insurance plan available under Obamacare–after Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Under the law, the penalty for not buying health insurance is supposed to be capped at either the annual average Bronze premium, 2.5 percent of taxable income, or $2,085.00 per family in 2016.

In the new final rules published Wednesday, IRS set in law the rules for implementing the penalty Americans must pay if they fail to obey Obamacare’s mandate to buy insurance.

More here

We all remember this arrogant statement from then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi:




Was she ever right! The corrupt politicians in Washington passed this massive boondoggle, and now the American people are learning every day more and more what is in this treacherous bill.
Not only must ObamaCare be repealed, but those who voted for it held responsible. This is a direct assault on the American people. It cannot be allowed to go unanswered.


http://thespeechatimeforchoosing.wor...0000-per-year/

Obamacare To Double Cost Of Insurance For Average Californian

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/02/2013 22:18 -0400

• NASDAQ
• Obamacare

Last week, the state of California claimed that its version of Obamacare’s health insurance exchange would actually reduce premiums. But, as Forbes reports, the data that the executive director of California's 'exchange' released tells a different story: Obamacare, in fact, will increase individual-market premiums in California by as much as 146 percent. The exuberance that Peter Lee exclaimed over the 'savings' is a misleading comparison. He was comparing apples - the plans that Californians buy today for themselves in a robust individual market-and oranges - the highly regulated plans that small employers purchase for their workers as a group. If you're a 25 year old male non-smoker, buying insurance for yourself, the cheapest plan on Obamacare’s exchanges is the catastrophic plan, which costs an average of $184 a month; but in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com, Forbes explains, the median cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92. In other words, for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent. The desperate spin of the <acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym> disaster is incredible as talk of a 'rate shock' is now very prescient, "these extraordinary increases are up to 15 times faster than inflation and threaten to make health care unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of Californians."



Via Forbes,

Last week, the state of California claimed that its version of Obamacare’s health insurance exchange would actually reduce premiums. “These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard,” boasted Peter Lee, executive director of the California exchange. But the data that Lee released tells a different story: Obamacare, in fact, will increase individual-market premiums in California by as much as 146 percent.
...

“The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market,” the state said in a press release, “ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions.”

That’s the sentence that led to all of the triumphant commentary from the left. “This is a home run for consumers in every region of California,” exulted Peter Lee.

Except that Lee was making a misleading comparison. He was comparing apples—the plans that Californians buy today for themselves in a robust individual market—and oranges—the highly regulated plans that small employers purchase for their workers as a group. The difference is critical.
...

If you’re a 25 year old male non-smoker, buying insurance for yourself, the cheapest plan on Obamacare’s exchanges is the catastrophic plan, which costs an average of $184 a month.

... But in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com (NASDAQ:EHTH), the median cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92.

In other words, for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.
...
Obamacare’s impact on 40-year-olds is steepest in the San Francisco Bay area, especially in the counties north of San Francisco, like Marin, Napa, and Sonoma. Also hard-hit are Orange and San Diego counties.


...
How did Lee and his colleagues explain the sleight-of-hand they used to make it seem like they were bringing prices down, instead of up? “It is difficult to make a direct comparison of these rates to existing premiums in the commercial individual market,” Covered California explained in last week’s press release, “because in 2014, there will be new standard benefit designs under the Affordable Care Act.” That’s a polite way of saying that Obamacare’s mandates and regulations will drive up the cost of premiums in the individual market for health insurance.

But rather than acknowledge that truth, the agency decided to ignore it completely, instead comparing Obamacare-based insurance to a completely different type of insurance product, that bears no relevance to the actual costs that actual Californians face when they shop for coverage today. Peter Lee calls it a “home run.” It’s more like hitting into a triple play.
...

So, Forbes' Avik Roy summarizes:

Supporters of Obamacare justified passage of the law because one insurer in California raised rates on some people by as much as 39 percent. But Obamacare itself more than doubles the cost of insurance on the individual market.

I can understand why Democrats in California would want to mislead the public on this point.

But journalists have a professional responsibility to check out the facts for themselves.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...ge-californian

With Family Rates Up To $20k Per Year, No Surprise Most Americans Unsure Of Buying Into Obamacare

June 4, 2013 by Ben Bullard

PHOTOS.COM

As the January 2014 deadline looms for Obamacare to take effect as the law of the land, nearly two-thirds of Americans are still on the fence about buying insurance under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
An InsuranceQuotes.com survey reveals that 64 percent of uninsured Americans are reticent about complying with Obamacare’s mandate to purchase health insurance – in part, according to one insurance industry advocate, because “people are still in the dark about what their options are going to be – and they’re skeptical that the penalty for not buying insurance is going to be enforced, at least in the first couple of years.”
But Obamacare was conceived as a closed system; one which would be buttressed by everyone’s participation. But with more than half of those whom the law was intended to benefit – the sick and uninsured – still wary they’ll see any financial benefit at all, the system is in danger of failure, even before it’s begun.
“[The] system is predicated on the theory that enough healthy people will enroll and buy insurance so that their premiums will offset the costs of benefits for less healthy people in the same plan,” Laura Adams, senior insurance analyst at InsuranceQuotes.com, told CNBC. “If only the sick enroll, it could be very precarious for the industry and the cost of insurance.”
Meanwhile, the embattled IRS has released a rulemaking proposal as it prepares to take on an enforcement role in implementing Obamacare. For a family of five, the agency is operating on the assumption that the cheapest insurance they’ll be able to buy will cost them $20,000 a year.
In a convoluted document; one littered with headache-inducing examples designed to illustrate how those opting out of Obamacare must calculate their mandatory “penalty,” the IRS posits that, while the “cheap” coverage will cost $20,000, the penalty for opting out altogether is relatively light. In fact, for a four-member family with a household income of $120,000, it would only come to $2,400 a year.


http://personalliberty.com/2013/06/0...nto-obamacare/