There certainly could be a better way to handle the 60 or so million people who don’t have insurance in this country. But, this is about control and bringing in a Marxist regime, not about providing health insurance.
The penaties Obamacare will impart for not signing up will skyrocket this year. In 2014 it was $95 per person or 1% of their income. This year it jumps to $325 per person or 2 percent of your annual income.
The enrollment deadline for 2015 is right around the corner, February 15th.
The numbers are daunting: It will take $1.993 trillion, a number that looks like $1,993,000,000,000, to provide insurance subsidies to poor and middle-class Americans, and to pay for a massive expansion of Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) costs.
Offsetting that massive outlay will be $643 billion in new taxes, penalties and fees related to the Obamacare law.
That revenue includes quickly escalating penalties – or ‘taxes,’ as the U.S. Supreme Court described them – on people who resist Washington’s command to buy medical insurance.
It also includes income from a controversial medical device tax, which some Republicans predict will be eliminated in the next two years.
If they’re right, Obamacare’s per-person cost would be even higher.
President Barack Obama pledged to members of Congress in 2009, as his signature insurance overhaul law was being hotly debated, that ‘the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.’
It would be a significant discount if the White House could return to that number today.
PRICEY: The federal government will spend $50,000 for each person recruited to buy insurance or neroll in free Medicaid through the Obamacare exchanges
In that same speech, Obama claimed that there were ‘more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.’
$900 billion spent on those people would equate to no more than $30,000 each – less than two-thirds of what the CBO now says the program will cost when the dust settles.
The CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, a group of members from both houses of Congress, prepared Monday’s report on the overall direction of the federal budget.
They estimated that ‘the net costs of the coverage provisions of the ACA [Affordable Care Act] will rise sharply as the effects of the act phase in from 2015 through 2017.’
Those costs will ‘rise steadily through 2022′ before leveling off for three years, the groups’ economists determined. But even at that point, the Obamacare program will cost the governemnt ‘about $145 billion’ each year.
That number doesn’t include the insurance premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs paid by Americans – only the government’s role in implementing the law and paying for its guarantees.
And the law will still leave ‘between 29 million and 31 million’ nonelderly Americans without medical insurance, says the CBO.
