Tag Archives: Mandate

How Obamacare raises your taxes if you don’t buy health insurance

Story here from the Daily Caller. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Shulman downplayed the IRS’s role in enforcing the recent overhaul of the health insurance industry by claiming the agency would not aggressively target individuals who don’t purchase coverage. He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don’t comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.

“These are not the kinds of things we send agents out about,” Shulman said. “These are things where you get a letter from us. Congress was very careful to make sure there was nothing too punitive in this bill.”

Many reports have claimed that enforcement of the individual mandate will be non-existent, but Shulman’s answers indicate differently. According to BusinessWeek, starting in 2015 Americans who don’t purchase insurance will be subject to a fine of $325 and that sum increases to $695 in 2016. However, the commissioner seemed confident that in most cases individuals would either receive subsidies to purchase insurance or simply do so on their own in order to comply with the law.

Here’s my previous story explaining how Obamacare is a bad deal for young men because they are forced to pay for the elderly, who use a lot of health care, and they also have to pay for coverage for treatments they will never need, like breast implants and in vitro and abortions. If you young men, and young people in general who are healthy, don’t want to pay for other people’s abortions, then you can kiss your tax refund goodbye.

How Obamacare took away my liberty

From Health Care BS. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

1. Don’t need or want a health insurance policy? Sorry, the individual mandate makes it a federal crime not to buy insurance.

2. Want to pay less in premiums by buying health insurance coverage with limits on coverage? Sorry, Obamacare also dictates how much coverage you must buy (including maternity coverage if you are a single male).

4. As an employer, you’d like to offer your employees high-deductible coverage or policies that don’t cover “children” as old as age 26? Sorry, that’s now illegal.

5. As a business-owner with 100 employees, you want to expand your sales and hire a few more people? Sorry, if you hire one more person, Obamacare requires you to buy insurance for all your employees.

6. You’re a physician and don’t want the government looking over your shoulder? Sorry, the HHS is now authorized to use your claims data to measure the resources you use.

Taking money from small businesses? That reduces the supply of jobs. Making doctors jump through hoops? That reduces the supply of doctors.

From Carrie Lukas at National Review. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Last night, Speaker Pelosi reiterated that passing the health-care legislation means that “Being a woman will no longer be a pre-existing medical condition.” It’s true that outlawing gender ratings will effectively shift women’s health costs to men (which means young men will see their health-insurance premiums rise disproportionately). Yet the Senate bill makes being a single mom a new kind of pre-existing condition: Instead of higher insurance premiums, these women will have fewer employment opportunities. Congratulations Mrs. Speaker.

What happens when you take money away from healthy single men? They don’t marry because they can’t afford to become husbands and fathers. Government replaces men as husbands and fathers. That’s what this health care bill does.

Obamacare slaps $15,000 annual fee on middle-class families

Story from Human Events. (H/T DoublePlusUndead via ECM)

Excerpt:

Fact 5: Your family insurance plan — if your employer drops your coverage and you are forced to buy it on your own — will cost about $15,000 per year when the legislation is in full force in 2016.

Page 19 of the CBO letter to Reid says the average premiums for insurance plans under the final version of the bill should be “quite similar” to the estimates the CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation made in a Nov. 30 letter to Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.: “Although CBO and JCT have not updated the estimates provided in that letter, the effects on premiums of the legislation incorporating the manager’s amendment would probably be quite similar.” Page 6 of the CBO’s letter to Bayh said: “Average premiums per policy in the nongroup market in 2016 would be roughly $5,800 for single policies and $15,200 for family policies under the proposal.”

The Senate health care bill gives employers two powerful incentives to stop offering health insurance coverage to their workers. First, if an employer does offer coverage, its lower-wage workers will lose the federal insurance subsidy they would otherwise get. Secondly, if an employer does not offer coverage, the $750-per-worker fine it faces will be far less than the premiums it would pay if it did offer coverage.

Where does this leave a mom and dad with two children and an annual income greater than $88,200? It leaves them without employer-based health insurance and facing a federally mandated $15,000-per-year insurance bill.

Because $90,000 is too much money for a family to make – Obama likes to spread the wealth around. And the people who vote for him are happy to get that wealth spread to them.