Posted on 02/01/2014 11:05:07 AM PST by 1rudeboy
The president and his Democratic allies are finding it harder to make people buy insurance than they’d expected. Will Obamacare’s individual mandate survive?
Last month, the administration announced that anyone with a canceled 2013 individual insurance plan would be exempt from the “individual-responsibility requirement” this year, and would be allowed to buy the catastrophe-only insurance previously offered to those age 30 or under.
This exemption is likely only the first of many. How, for one, can the administration exempt people who had insurance last year but not exempt people who were uninsured because they couldn’t afford coverage?
Obamacare’s architects were always ambivalent about the mandate. They knew compulsion was necessary to make their system work — but, fearing a backlash, opted for a fairly weak penalty for those who didn’t obey. Oops: They wound up with a mandate that still provokes resentment, yet probably won’t work.
The US Supreme Court weakened the mandate even as it was saving Obamacare. The law’s authors hoped that the mandate would create the perception that insurance enrollment is now obligatory, but the high court made it clear that Congress has no authority to institute such a requirement. The justices ruled that the mandate could stand only as an optional tax, not as a fine for noncompliance.
So you’re not breaking the law by not buying (overpriced) Obamacare-compliant insurance; you’re just making the legal choice to pay the tax instead.
And that tax will generally be far lower than Obamacare premiums. That’s the clear conclusion of a new study by the 2017 Project, which compares premiums in the Obamacare exchanges in the 50 most populous US counties to the tax that households could pay instead.
(Excerpt) Read more at aei.org ...
The penalty ‘tax’ will go up and up.
People that think that the IRS can’t force you to pay the penalty tax are wrong.
It’s been stated that they can only take the penalty from any tax refund you may have coming but what will happen is they will take the penalty from your payroll tax first and say that at the end of the year you owe more taxes.
They know how to collect unpaid taxes.
Mark my words, they will apply the penalty first and anything payed in after the penalty is covered will apply to your taxes.
My thinking is that “Civil Disobedience” is going to garner a WHOLE LOT of attention in the coming years.
If enough people refuse to sign up for Ophonybamacare, there is no way in HELL that the IRS can police it.
And, if they try to, then “Civil Disobedience” will take on a WHOLE NEW MEANING!
Stand by, FReepers!
Plan for the worst, hope for the best!
The mandate, though is an essential part of the scheme because without it you would also have to allow denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions. The two go hand in hand.
If you get rid of the mandate but continue to require insurers to cover new sick people, there is no longer any reason for anyone in the country to buy “insurance” until they get sick.
Yours is a FINE ARGUMENT for replacing the income tax with a National Retail Sales Tax (i.e., the FairTax) and ABOLISHING THE IRS!
Thanks for making it for me!
As long as the penalty is even $1 less than the cost of coverage... people will choose to pay the penalty and only bother to get coverage when they actually get sick or hurt, at which point they by law are not allowed to be denied coverage.
If a huge fraction of the populace become criminals by not paying the tax, this has serious potential to undermine the rule of law in the U.S. When you have to lie, cheat, deceive and steal to survive, there are broad societal implications; this could perhaps completely undermine what’s left of Western civilization.
Well what you said is possible. They did hire an additional 15,000 attorneys and accounts to administer this....
Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous….One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy”—the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people—than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs. Link
I had a catastrophic-care individual policy that cost me about $240 per month. It was cancelled by Obamacare 12/31/13 and I was offered replacement coverage at triple that, along with the mandates for maternity care - which was ridiculous because I am a 61 year-old single male who had a vasectomy in 1984.
I just cancelled and am running bare.
I only had 3 physicians in my lifetime. The first was the guy who delivered me in 1952 and saw me through all the usual childhood diseases (usually through house calls at $10 per, then had the discourtesy to die in 1972.
The second was a guy who treated me to a successful vasectomy after the birth of my second child in 1984.
The third was a guy who barely spoke English who diagnosed 4 broken ribs in 7 places and prescribed some pain medication, muscle relaxants, and a lung exercise device - supposedly to prevent me from contracting pneumonia. I won't even say what that experience cost me - even with insurance.
Hey, I may even quit filing tax returns, if that's what it takes.
Let the feds come put me in prison. 3 hots and a cot, health care, cable television, library, etc., etc. That's a lot better than what I have right now.
This was the goal all along. If people signed up, great. The government gets a kickback from insurance programs and massive new taxes on a plethora of things. If people don’t sign up, great, get those taxes plus more taxes from people who don’t have insurance. Those taxes will never go away and the amount they tax will always rise. It’s all about feeding the beast.
Congressional democrats enacted this monsterous un-affordable care act, now the pseudo-president amends it at will. Where did America go?
I surely hope that this is true and we're not fooling ourselves like we did about how Romney was going to win because of a lack of obama stickers, signs, anecdotals of workplace comments, etc., etc.
That is a slam dunk. As the financial condition worsens, don't think for a second that the "free-loaders" without medical care won't have the percentages on their income raised from the current 2.5%.
Another thing. The IRS will keep adding yearly to the amount you "owe". Imagine how many thousands of dollars you will "owe" them after 5, 10, 20+ years. Does anybody think this "debt" is really going to be forgotten or forgiven by the kindly IRS? When you die, what is left in your estate will be paying it.
You'll just be lucky if by that time they haven't figured out how to tack on penalties and interest, because at some point in the future, they will. When that happens, you will lucky if your heirs will have the money left in your estate to give you anything other than a pauper's burial.
Selling insurance is a tough game for amateurs. They should have started with a lemonade stand...kids run better businesses than this! (But I’m betting they wouldn’t last a week).
But, due to the law of unintended consequences...many people are now discovering just how affordable health care is when you pay cash to doctors with no insurance middleman.
Their next wet balloon move will have to be a heavier handed attempt to counter that (as Canada did) and I don’t see that working out for the left. The path to single payer was not as sure as they wished to believe.
Well since they are not going to initially be that busy they can always look at Tea Party groups.
Yeah, I hear you, I almost don’t care anymore either.
Heck no a/c is like hell in sfl. The jails are air conditioned.
The whole law is like an amoeba.
It is whatever Baraq and Seb say it is on a given day.
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