Here’s what happens when you pass a healthcare bill that supposedly requires everyone to buy health insurance (and insurance companies to cover them), but keeps the penalties for not buying health insurance way lower than health-insurance premiums? Lots of people decide not to buy health insurance until they get really sick!
So who picks up the tab for this? You do! You honest, premium-paying, tax-paying suckers who will get shafted if the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill becomes law, writes Dick Morris for RealClear Politics. Not only will your insurance premiums skyrocket to make up for those who would rather pay a $1,000 fine than 7.5 percent of their income in premiums (which means $3,500 a year for a family earning $50,000) as the Senate bill requies. You also will be hit with more taxes and, if you’re over 65, fewer medical services.
Here’s Morris’s list of middle-class gouges hidden in the Senate bill:
• $1,700 more in insurance premiums for the average family
•Medical devices like wheelchairs and hearing aids get taxed
• Those who are sick must pay an average of about $600 more a year in income taxes because the bill raises the threshold for deducting medical expenses from 7.5 percent of income to 10 percent
• A $404 billion cut in Medicare
• Ending the subsidized Medicare Advantage insurance for costs over and above Medicare. Without Medicare Advantage, the elderly can only augment Medicare by buying Medigap coverage, for which no subsidy is available and whose premiums are higher (offered, conveniently enough, by Obama’s buddies at the AARP)
•No importation of Canadian medicines and no competitive bidding to hold down prescription drug costs (Obama’s deal to get Pharma’s support and advertising dollars)
•A shortage of medical personnel and equipment as 30 million new patients are added without any expansion of the population of doctors and nurses. This shortage will make rationing inevitable, even if it shortens life expectancies among the elderly.
Want to support President Obama’s “first tax on the middle class,” as Morris calls it? Support the Senate bill.