Higher Taxes And No Insurance??

Here's one of the nasty little secrets that you're never going to hear in the mainstream media:

Keith Hennessey has done a little digging into the House method of paying for health-care reform and sees some significant sleight-of-hand in the details. Barack Obama says that he wants to provide health-care coverage for all Americans without raising taxes on anyone under $250,000. Keith points out that the proposal in fact does tax people who make less than the Obama definition of rich, and significantly:

As expected, the House bill would mandate that individuals and families have or buy health insurance.

But what if they don’t buy it?

Then Section 401 kicks in. Any individual (or family) that does not have health insurance would have to pay a new tax, roughly equal to the smaller of 2.5% of your income or the cost of a health insurance plan. …

I assume the bill authors would respond, “But why wouldn’t you want insurance? After all, we’re subsidizing it for everyone up to 400% of the poverty line.”

That is true. But if you’re a single person with income of $44,000 or higher, then you’re above 400% of the poverty line. You would not be subsidized, but would face the punitive tax if you didn’t get health insurance. This bill leaves an important gap between the subsidies and the cost of health insurance. CBO says that for about eight million people, that gap is too big to close, and they would get stuck paying higher taxes and still without health insurance.

This doesn’t just amount to a slight gap in the net that allows a few oddball cases to slip, either. Keith provides two scenarios, both entirely plausible, to demonstrate how the CBO determined that eight million people — around 20% of the current uninsured — would likely end up with no insurance and higher taxes.

Someone really should ask the President and the Democrats pushing this how they can justify this. Any reporters out there care to take up the question?

Combined with the open punitive taxation on 'the rich', Hot Air provides the obvious conclusion:

...the “surtax” would apply to about 2.1 million Americans. The mandate for coverage will force almost four times as many middle-class Americans to pay higher taxes as a result of the ObamaCare plan in the House while preventing them from getting coverage. The House hasn’t soaked the rich; they’ve declared war on the middle class and the uninsured.

Of course they have. It's all part of the re-making process, you know.

There's my two cents.