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The New Healthcare Tax That the IRS Won’t Enforce

Politifact, the fact-checking website run by the Tampa Bay Times, last week questioned assertions by some Republican politicians that Obamacare represented a massive tax increase after conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that it was “the largest tax increase in the history of the world.” Politifact said that hyperbolic statement dwelled “in the realm of the ridiculous” and gave the statement its least coveted “Pants on Fire” award.

The Obamacare tax increase by the time it is fully in effect in 2019 will total just 0.49 percent of gross domestic product, which is roughly equivalent to the tax increases passed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and President Bill Clinton in 1993, the paper’s website reported. And it will be significantly less than the tax increase signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, which tipped the balance sheet at 0.8 percent of GDP
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150 million Americans who receive insurance through their public or private employers do not pay the tax; the nearly 100 million Americans who gets their insurance through Medicaid and Medicaid do not pay the tax; nor will people who pay no income tax, even if they are uninsured, since the legislation has no enforcement power.More at http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/07/03/The-New-Healthcare-T
ax-That-The-IRS-Wont-Enforce.aspx#page1 you have it. It has NO ENFORCEMENT POWER.

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That's the biggest stretch since Armstrong. It's going to effect EVERYONE, destroy our economy, and drive costs way the hell up.

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Beginning in 2014, if you are uninsured, not exempt from the new mandate, and refuse to sign up for health care coverage, how much will you owe Uncle Sam?

The health care law sets out a formula to determine your penalty, which will be assessed and collected by the IRS as part of your federal income taxes.

There are plenty of exemptions from the penalty. You do not face it if your insurance premiums would be more than 8 percent of your gross income, if you’re a member of an American Indian tribe, or if you lacked insurance for less than three months during a year.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects that 7 million uninsured, non-exempt Americans will refuse to get medical coverage and face the penalty in 2016. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/health-care-law-mandate-t
ax-how-much-is-it/ million out of how many? And remember, even those don't have to pay it, as Roberts made it clear it's UENFORCEABLE. Now, as to the bullshit Raptor spewed:

From Kaiser:

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“That people know about the mandate—and may even worry about it—is not surprising, given both the heated political controversy and the constitutional challenge surrounding this provision of the law,” begin the authors from the Urban Institute. “What may be surprising, however, is that if the ACA were in effect today, 94 percent of the total population (93 percent of the nonelderly population) or 250.3 million people out of 268.8 million nonelderly people—would not face a requirement to newly purchase insurance or pay a fine,” find the authors, who were funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for this analysis. The authors used “the Urban Institute’s Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model (HIPSM) to estimate the number and share of Americans potentially subject to the mandate, identify their insurance status absent the ACA, and simulate eligibility for Medicaid and exchange-based premium and cost-sharing subsidies.” http://healthreform.kff.org/scan/2012/march/urban-institute-report-exa
mines-how-many-would-be-affected-by-the-mandate.aspx all the spin and punditry about the national health care law’s mandate that Americans buy health insurance or pay a penalty, the vast majority wouldn’t be forced to buy anything or pay any penalty.

In fact, only 6 percent of Americans, about 18 million people, would have to “newly purchase” insurance under the law, the study found. And of this group, roughly 11 million would be eligible for subsidies to help buy their coverage from new insurance marketplaces, or “exchanges,” created by the law.

This relatively thin sliver of Americans who’d be required to pay for full coverage belies the dominant public perception that the mandate would be a financial strain for wide swaths of the population.

“That was one of the reasons we wanted to do this study, because we felt like the real impact was being blow out of proportion,” said Blumberg, who was the lead researcher on the study.

A closer look at numbers shows that 87.4 million of the 268.8 million Americans under age 65 would be exempt from the mandate because they’re illegal immigrants, have incomes below the law’s tax-filing threshold or can’t get coverage because the premiums would eat up too much of their income.

Nearly 75 percent of this group – 63.4 million – already have coverage, while 24 million do not. Blumberg said these 24 million comprised 7.3 million illegal immigrants, 14.3 million people whose incomes are below the tax-filing threshold and 2.4 million people who can’t get affordable coverage.

That leaves 181 million Americans under age 65 who could be subject to the mandate, Blumberg said. But 86 percent of this group, 155 million people, already have coverage.

“So they’re not going to be subject to any penalty. They don’t have to change anything that they’re doing,” Blumberg said. “Some of them have public coverage already, some of them are buying coverage on their own, some of them are in employer-based insurance.”

That leaves 26 million non-elderly people who are uninsured and potentially subject to the penalty.
Of this group, 8 million are low-income people who’d be eligible for free coverage under Medicaid. Nearly 11 million others probably would get federal subsidies to buy coverage on the insurance exchanges, “so they wouldn’t have to pay the full freight, but they would have to pay something in order to avoid a penalty,” Blumberg said.

In his majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. suggested that the law’s penalties for not obtaining coverage may not be enough to compel the uninsured to purchase it.

“Some people will definitely pay the penalty instead,” Blumberg acknowledged. “But I think people would also like to spend their money and get something in return, rather than spending it and getting nothing in return, which is what the penalty is.” http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/06/29/154483/health-care-laws-mandate-
unlikely.html, from the same, another nice little chart for you:



Put that in your pipe and smoke it Raptor! He'll go on spouting the party line, we all know it, but unless he can show any proof from a VERIFIABLE source that shows otherwise, what he claimed is pure, unadulterated bullshit.

If the damed Dems/Obama would just explain how few would be affected by this, dammit, the favorable/unfavorable numbers would be a helluvalot different. Problem is, the right has done an all-too-good job of spinning the damned thing to scare people--not Raptor, I'm pretty sure that's just another of his idiotic claims just to get attention, but the rest of the country...