"No no no! It's a tax"
Posted on 12/26/2017 10:51:24 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
Tax-reform legislation signed into law last week eliminates the federal penalty for not having health insurance, starting in 2019. That’s good news for those who’ve been buying ObamaCare to avoid the penalty, and even better news for those who’ve actually been paying the penalty.
But don’t start celebrating yet. In New York, California, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey and other deep-blue strongholds, the insurance industry and left-wing activists are agitating to enact state penalties to replace the soon-to-be defunct federal one.
Ouch! Six-and-a-half million filers paid the federal penalty last year, including approximately 400,000 right here in New York and 60,000 in neighboring Connecticut. The penalty-payers largely earned less than $50,000 a year. They paid the penalty because they found ObamaCare unaffordable.
But paying the penalty also hurt. It’s $695 or 2.5 percent of household income, whichever is more. Getting rid of that penalty will be a sizable tax break for them.
Tell that to insurance companies already lobbying in Albany, Sacramento, Hartford and other capitals for a state penalty. They’re looking out for their own interests. What could be sweeter than a law requiring consumers to buy their product or get whacked with a hefty fine if they refuse? State lawmakers need to hear from the public that doubling down on ObamaCare’s coercive model is a mistake.
Paul Macielak, president of the insurance lobby New York Health Plan Association, insists “New York’s individual market must be protected.” What he means is that without a penalty, many healthy people will say “no” to ObamaCare’s high premiums and drop out of those plans. How about protecting the millions who finally will get relief from the ObamaCare penalty?
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Furthermore, everyone should be required to have auto insurance, even those who don’t own a car, even those who do not have a drivers license, even those too young to drive.
To make it fair, everyone should share equally the need for auto insurance.
Furthermore, everyone should have life insurance ....
Furthermore, everyone should have .... whatever a majority of the politicians say they should have.
They aren't. They are supposed to be destroyed.
Keeping the system the way it is carries overhead costs (not attributable to specific encounters) of around a trillion dollars/year. It's "subsidies for other people's insurance" that allows the whole thing to exist in the first place.
I hope they do it.....will be a wake-up call for a few leftists that aren’t completely brain dead yet....and give Trump more ammo about Pelosi and Schumer types....
I realize that, in a sense, insurance is designed to spread costs among the covered pool, and charges extra for operating expenses and so forth.
What I meant when I said that I don't want to pay subsidies for other people's insurance is that I don't want to pay extra for them to have insurance. They should have to buy their own.
Obamacare was pushed through on such a lie. People who are too poor to buy insurance have always been able to get coverage through government programs. As far as I know, those government programs did not go away under Obamacare. But people who buy insurance ended up subsidizing people who won't buy insurance anyway.
So they want even more taxpayers to move, joining the taxpayers who are leaving their states because SALT deductions are limited under tax reform. Joining the taxpayers who have been leaving their states for decades now because of the sky-high taxes.
Really, liberalism is a mental disorder! Liberals don't seem to comprehend what is happening.
(President Trump divides his time among Washington DC, Florida, New Jersey and NYC. I would love to see him ceremoniously change his driver's license, official state residence and voter registration over to Florida before the 2020 election!)
It is Illegal to force anyone to buy anything.
...
Unless the transaction is disguised as a tax.
That wasn't because banks were allowed to do business across state lines, at least no directly. The fact that interstate banking had become universal was used to justify much greater intrusion into the industry by the Fed and other federal agencies. It has been the bank regulators who have been pushing and even forcing banks to consolidate. Bureaucracies like to deal with organization that look like them.
The problem in a nutshell is Medicare, or, more exactly, the promise to pay for anything which is useful or potentially useful in improving the quality or the duration of life.
Democrats being Democrats did not understand in 1965 that this promise wouldn't just cover services and things that existed in 1965, but rather would result in an explosion of expensive technologies and procedures which would never have come into existence without the Federal promise to pay.
Take a simple example: the implantable defibrillator.
This device can shock your heart back into sinus rhythm after you arrest and before you are dead. It's quite a complex unit, Medicare pays around $60K for one. The unit cost of the first 100 devices, R&D folded in, must have been quite a bit higher.
Now, these devices work. They are "necessary" (meaning they actually reverse real cardiac arrests) in about 1% of the people who have them. They are "necessary" (meaning a person who gets one is at increased risk of cardiac arrest) in most people who get one.
Now, in order to ramp up R&D and then production, the inventors and manufacturers had to visualize a profitable business. They didn't do it to be nice.
In 1955, how many families with 75+ year old grandparents would willingly spend $60 000 on a 1% chance that when grandpa's time was up he could live another few months? Were there enough of them to capitalize a whole industry?
Of course not.
Now multiply this example by 100 (chemotherapy, dialysis, laser eye surgery, and so on, and so on).
This is the cost problem in a nutshell.
Medicare stopped paying full freight in 1986. But the inventions Medicare stimulated still existed, and exist today. People want them. People demand them. They have become the Standard of Care™.
But nobody is any more willing to pay for them than they were in 1955.
So. We print money furiously. We borrow tons of it.
And, we subsidize other people's "insurance".
Blowing up "Obamacare" by cutting off revenue will not make this problem go away. It may make it worse.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/26/nearly-450000-people-fled-these-three-deep-blue-states-in-2017/
WTG, NYS! We're #1! In bugouts.
Few people anticipate a heart attack or stroke or accident and aren't going to apply for insurance if they are unconscious. Coverage of preexisting conditions doesn't help if they don't have any insurance when they arrive in the ER.
Insurers could be allowed to sell a high deductible plan without PC mandated coverage of benefits like contraception with $0 deductible. It would be much cheaper.
(Since they mandate some benefits with $0 deductible, high deductible plans under Obamacare aren't high deductible plans, no matter what they call them.)
Some states mandated coverage for preexisting conditions before Obamacare. Those states had relatively high health insurance premiums, but it was done before.
R&D is another issue.
I know that medical devices and new pharmaceuticals are incredibly expensive to develop and produce—I work in the medical research industry.
Perhaps the problem there is that we are trying to do everything as fast as possible. For thousands of years, research proceeded at a snail’s pace. Now, in the last century, it has gone at breakneck speed (although the progress on any specific research problem can still be quite slow). In the meantime, advocates for scientific organizations, e.g. “American Association for the Advancement of Science” keep pushing for more money to be distributed in grants. Etc.
Any new technology has a price tag.
Perhaps part of the problem is that our culture expects miracles, and that so many people can’t accept the reality of death. So that creates a cultural push towards spending gadzillions on R&D, with the expectation that we will be able to cure everything if enough money is thrown at it.
Anyway, it’s a complicated issue. No doubt, the solutions are even more complicated.
I’m happier for me but not for thee.
New York State has lost an amazing 18 seats in Congress (and electoral votes) since 1950. It had 45 congressional districts in 1950. It has 27 districts today. It last had that few in 1813-1823.
So you prefer they die?
Looks like John Roberts is going to be put on the spot again.
Just take the penalty out of that 2500 I saved
No I don't want them to just die.
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