Free Republic

Here’s your Orwellian Phrase for the Week: Individual shared responsibility payment. Yeah… Go ahead and try to wrap your brain around that amalgamation of contradictory concepts. The phrase is not gleamed from some glossy DNC spin-office, or a Harvard professor’s latest psychobabble posing as an academic paper. Apparently the phrase is the IRS’s fancy (new) term for the Obamacare Mandate tax that individuals will have to pay if they fail to get health insurance this year. As reported by Americans for Tax Reform: If you (or any of your dependents) do not maintain coverage and do not qualify for an...

The fee would pay for half of the annual operating costs of Connect for Health Colorado, the state Obamacare exchange, according to Health News Colorado. The exchange’s latest financial plan comes soon after its oversight board rejected a proposal to hike fees on those who use the website from 1.4 percent to 1.7 percent. Connect for Health Colorado staff has said the increase was needed to keep it solvent. Board members said staff should look at cutting expenses before raising fees, and many had the same reaction to the proposed $13 million fee, which is being called a “general market health insurer assessment.” Others call it...

March 31 is the deadline to enroll for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. After that day, individuals without insurance could face a penalty. That penalty is $95 or 1% of your income, whichever is more. Even though the White House extended that deadline, the State of Connecticut is not. Monday remains the deadline but there are some exceptions that would allow you to enroll after then without penalty. "If you have some sort of a life status change: a divorce or death, loss of insurance coverage through an employer, those would be considered life status changes and you...

2014 is the first year most Americans will have to either have health insurance or face a tax penalty. But most people who are aware of the penalty think it's pretty small, at least for this first year. And that could turn into an expensive mistake. "I'd say the vast majority of people I've dealt with really believe that the penalty is only $95, if they know about it at all," says Brian Haile, senior vice president for health policy at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service. "And when people find out, they're stunned. It's much, much higher than they would expect."...

Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) called out the Obama administration for an “outrageous” Obamacare tax exemption for certain unions that he says will be passed on to the American people. “Every American ought to be outraged,” he said. “This is cronyism at its worst. Basically, what the president said was that he and his friends are above the law, because there is a reinsurance tax in Obamacare that’s designed to apply to all self-insured plans. And what the president did is he waived that for certain, self-insured, self-administered plans, namely unions, so they don’t have to pay that tax. And...

In an official document, the Internal Revenue Service, the enforcer of Obamacare’s mandates, is estimating that the cheapest Obamacare plan (the Bronze level of coverage) will cost a family of four $20,000 per year. Matt Cover of CNS News writes: 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...

The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on Wednesday to reduce the fine/“tax” for violating Obamacare’s individual mandate this year to $0. It will be interesting to see how Democrats in both the House and Senate react. President Obama has plainly violated the law—and the constitutional separation of powers—by unilaterally delaying the individual mandate for some people (those who liked their health plan but got a cancellation notice) and by unilaterally delaying the employer mandate. Given these extralegal executive actions, and given the technological train wreck than the Obamacare exchange rollout has been, it would seem to be a...

(CNSNews.com) – 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...

GET INVOLVED Email:* Zip Code: *Required Privacy Policy Email Print Tuesday, February 25, 2014 6:20 PM EST John Kartch Related Items Grover Norquist discusses the Obamacare Cover Up Obamacare Exchanges Enroll Only 51,000 Uninsured Americans The Obamacare Signup Cover-up Daily Media Spotlight for August 15, 2013 Read More IRS Warns: Obamacare Tax Must Be Paid with Tax Return Agency employs Orwellian term “Shared Responsibility Payment” to describe Obamacare individual mandate tax. President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service today quietly released a series of Obamacare “Health Care Tax Tips” warning Americans that they must obtain “qualifying” health insurance – as defined by...

Your 2014 tax return will ask if you had insurance coverage or qualified for an exemption. If not, you may owe a shared responsibility payment when you file in 2015.

The chief justice must have "gone off his meds." No, it was blackmail. No, it was cowardice. He caved. It was a perverse abdication of his fundamental responsibility. Those are some of the many disputations that came in to American Thinker regarding my exploration of another possible explanation for why Chief Justice John Roberts chose, astonishingly, to keep the "Affordable Care Act" alive and kicking.("The Roberts Trap Is Sprung", American Thinker, Jan. 2) Of the nearly 680 comments, roughly four out of five were against the thesis I advanced, which is that Roberts ruled as he did because he foresaw...

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...

The health reform law is trying to force $15 an hour workers and their employers to buy more than a million dollars of coverage when they don't have anything like a million dollars in assets to protect. Further, some of these families are being forced to give up "mini-med" plans that paid the first $2,000 or $3,000 of medical bills and enroll in plans with deductibles of $10,000 or more. Why do we need to force a family at this income level need to pay the first $10,000 of medical costs? We don't. I can think of only two reasons...

A District of Columbia federal judge rejected a lawsuit Wednesday that challenged tax credits for Obamacare coverage in the 36 states with federal-run exchanges – one of the most significant remaining legal fights over President Barack Obama’s health care law.The four individuals who brought the lawsuit, Halbig v. Sebelius, had argued that the IRS overstepped its legal authority by allowing federal-run exchanges to provide tax credits for people who purchase health insurance. They contended that the Affordable Care Act only allows for state-run exchanges to access such credits and that Congress purposefully designed the law that way to incentivize states...

Ezra Klein: Give me your status report on Obamacare. Where do you think the law stands now? Robert Laszewski: They’re about where I expected them to be. HealthCare.Gov on the front-end is in pretty good shape. It’s where it should’ve been at launch. The back-end is still highly problematic. Clearly the administration put its emphasis on the consumer side. Insurers are still seeing errors in probably 5 percent of the files coming through. That’s compounded by the issue of all the people enrolling in the last few weeks. That’s a huge surge that would create customer-service problems in the best...

When Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Supreme Court’s Marxist bloc in ruling the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate constitutional, stunned conservatives immediately accused him of committing an “act of judicial cowardice.” “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices,” wrote the supremely hypocritical Roberts as he shattered one of the first rules of judicial restraint by rewriting sections of ObamaCare from the bench. Although he refused to “protect” the people from a wanton abuse of power, he was more than willing to protect DC lawmakers from the consequences of passing...

Ever heard of a federal law 42 USC § 18115: Freedom Not to Participate in Federal Health Insurance Programs? I haven’t either.But thanks to FOTM reader Joseph, now we all do!This is how Cornell University Law School’s website describes 42 USC § 18115: No individual, company, business, nonprofit entity, or health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall be required to participate in any Federal health insurance program created under this Act(or any amendments made by this Act), or in any Federal health insurance program expanded by this Act (or any such amendments), and there shall be no penalty or fine imposed upon any such...

Why is this man smirking? OK, not really praise; Roberts’s failure to strangle the Obamacare baby in its crib when he had the chance will go down alongside the Dred Scott decision as one of the greatest moral disasters in the history of the republic. The man in charge of enforcing the Constitution blinked when confronted with a triumphalist party and a then-popular president, forgetting that he, Roberts, would likely be in Washington long after Obama was gone. In an attempt to save the Supreme Court’s reputation and standing, he destroyed it.Still, even if inadvertently, Roberts got one thing right:...

It seems that the crumbling house of cards that is ObamaCare continues to crumble. Every day, some new scandal is reported, new heart-breaking stories of hard-working Americans losing their health insurance, and legal challenges mount. It's so bad that Obama supporters are madly spinning lies in the vain hope that the public will continue to be fooled despite the curtain already having been drawn back. Obama has done his best to deflect the mounting criticism over his so-called Affordable Care Act by pointing at the economy, making a terrible deal with Iran that lets them continue enriching uranium, and embarking...

The idea behind Obamacare is to make the young and the healthy overpay for insurance to subsidize everyone else. In an effort to persuade individuals to purchase insurance, the law provides a scale of escalating penalties starting in 2014 and increasing in 2015, then again in 2016. Actually, there are two penalty rates, and you pay the higher of the two, not both. 2014 Penalties 1% of your yearly household income. The maximum penalty is the national average yearly premium for a bronze plan.$95 per adult ($47.50 per child under 18). The maximum penalty per family using this method is...