One of the newest liberal lines is that the President has not and does not want to raise taxes, well except for maybe anyone making over $250,000 a year. A few weeks ago we wrote that the Obama care bill is actually a tax bill. But “no” my liberal friends cried, “it’s a health care bill!” So I thought we should look at some of the health care issues addressed in the bill.
1. Medical Device Manufacturing Tax; a 2.3 % tax on medical device makers, every pacemaker, prosthetic limb and blood pressure monitor will increase in price in six months. Just to make the tax more insidious, it is on gross sales so even companies doing cutting edge medical development who have not been able to turn a profit will owe the tax. Interesting approach to decrease the cost of health care, increase the cost of medical equipment.
2. Increase of the deductible medical expenses; currently Americans are able to deduct their medical expense’s greater than 7.5% of their adjusted gross income, in six months that will increase to 10%. Interesting approach to lower people health care expenses, take away their tax deductions and collect billions of new tax paid.
3. Flexible Spending Account Care; in six months 24 million Americans will have a $2,500 cap on their FSA where none existed before. By restricting these pretax programs, ObamaCare effectively increases the taxes on medical care for everyone with a FSA. We are getting a theme here, lower the cost of health care by increasing taxes. Remember the “if you like your health insurance you can keep it” promise?
4. Limiting Health Saving Accounts; starting in 2011 the bill written to increase our access to HSA limited what HSA accounts can be used for. Before Obamacare passed people with HAS accounts could use their pretax HSA dollars for over the counter medications. So no reason to go to the doctor for a prescription to Ibuprofen, not any more, buy the product with after tax money or go to the doctor so you can use your HSA account. “You can keep your health care if you like it” lie take two.
5. A new ObamaCare surtax takes the top capital gains rate to 23.8 percent and top dividend rate to 43.4 percent. Does it seem strange that the health care bill is changing the capital gains rate? As much as 135 billion dollars out of American’s pockets into the federal government. The liberals don’t really see this as a problem - it only affects wealthy people.
6. Medicare tax increase; employers will pay an additional 80 billion dollars over the next 10 years because of this increase in Medicare taxes, employers might want to use this money to pay their employees, or contribute to their employees’ health care. But instead they will contribute to the federal government.
Billions of new taxes collected so the government can then turn around and hand some of that taxed money back to the citizens. 290 times the ObamCare bill addresses taxes, every time increasing the cost of health care. The amazing thing about five of the six massive tax increases outlined above is they don’t take effect until after the 2014 election. It was so imperative to pass this bill, pass it so quickly that no one in Congress actually had time to read it, but almost four years after it passed and most of its major initiatives have not even gone into effect. The Presidents states that you can keep you existing health care insurance if you like it and then makes changes to existing HSA and FSA health plans. The President’s party states that the President has not raise taxes while a tax time bomb called ObamaCare sits on the books.
Maybe the President does not count tax increases in the health care bills as a tax increase - - but what were we saying about quacking like a duck?
No comments:
Post a Comment