The Obamacare Bait And Switch

August 30, 2013 by Bob Livingston

The Internal Revenue Service theft squad issued its final rules on the Obamacare individual mandate Tuesday. They reveal that the whole thing is a bait and switch to benefit a few crony corporations and transfer wealth from the people, as we have told you from the beginning.
While the employer mandate has been delayed, the individual mandate remains in place. The new system requires individuals to carry some minimum health insurance or pay a penalty (read tax). But surprise! The tax will be lower — much lower for most people — than the cost of their existing insurance plan in 2014.

The tax for 2014 is $95 or 1 percent of household income, whichever is greater. In other words, a single person making $50,000 per year would pay a tax of $500 for not carrying insurance. By 2016, the taxes increase to $695 or 2.5 percent of income. The person earning $50,000 per year would pay a tax of $1,250.
According to ehealthinsurance.com, a 30-year-old male in Charlotte, N.C., can expect to pay between $60 and $215 per month for a health insurance plan with high deductibles, some $5,000 or more. That comes to at least $720 for a bare-bones plan. In Albany, N.Y., rates range from $165 to $1,150; in Columbus, Ohio, $50 to $110; in Tucson, Ariz., $41 to $145; in Sacramento, Calif., $94 to $227. As you can see, the rates are all over the board, depending on the State in which one lives.

(For an insurance quote in a specific location, go here.)

But a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average worker paid between $863 and $1,065 per year for single coverage in 2013, while the average family of four paid between $4,226 and $5,284.

For many people (if not most), the penalty is so much less than the cost of buying insurance that it makes sense to drop insurance altogether and pay the tax. And Kaiser found that many employers will find it easier to drop coverage and shift employees to the exchanges rather than try to jump through the hoops needed to comply with the employer mandate. Once large numbers of premium-paying customers are driven out of traditional health insurance, Obamacare has them in a trap.

All but a few crony insurers will go out of business. The few surviving crony privileged insurers will then get all the business through the exchanges; and the progressives will be one step closer to their goal of a single-payer, government-provided insurance system.

But there is a problem for the statists in the Obamacare law:

There is no defined penalty for not including the special Obamacare compliance form in your tax return. It cannot garnish wages or seize property. Section 1051 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act reads: “Such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure.”

There is still something you can do to vent your displeasure at the fascist, crony system they’ve created, even if it probably won’t make a lot of difference. Call your Congressweasel today or attend a town hall meeting (if your Congressweasel is brave enough to hold one), and say in no uncertain terms that Obamacare should be defunded in the upcoming continuing resolution. The weasels probably won’t listen, but at least they’ll know why you’re shouting them down when they come begging for votes next year.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Freedom Watch, Hot Topics


http://personalliberty.com/2013/08/3...it-and-switch/