All this time you've been saying that Obamacare was a stepping-stone to nationalized health care, while I've been claiming that it bore a much greater resemblance to fascism. Well, you were right (most likely). http://is.gd/b0prs (apologies for no text and shortened URL, I'm posting from my phone.) Long story short, the IRS is not allowed to actually enforce the mandate by any means. No past due accrual, interest, no penalties, no liens or garnishments for failure to pay, and no civil or criminal liability. Without enforcement, and no exclusion of preexisting conditions allowed, the insurers will certainly all go bankrupt, enabling a government takeover of the system. Mea culpa on not believing you.
Seriously, this just basically throws out the individual mandate without it ever being taken to the Supreme Court.
Most taxpayers don't really know what they're doing. Working people who aren't insured are at the top of that list. They never bother setting up their withholding properly, and they end up getting income tax rebate checks. My guess is that the most people will actually comply with the mandate, and that for those who don't, offsets to rebates will collect the heavy majority of the tax for failure to comply with the mandate. That said, I don't know that this kind of differential treatment by the IRS makes any sense. Of course the IRS shouldn't be wasting it's money auditing the working poor and lower middle class--the people most likely to be subject to this tax--nearly as much as it does in the first place, but that should be dealt with differently.
All we have to do is look at what Obama and others have said in the past. They've all said they want a single payer system under a Universial Health Care system. The public option was first put into the original bill because the goal was to get as many people on the public option by: #1 getting busineses to stop offering health care because it would be cheaper to pay the fine then pay the costs of the healthcare #2 by forcing people off their own healthcare and into the government public option because under the original plan if a buisness changed even one tiny tiny piece of the health care they offered their employees those employees automatically went into the public option Getting everyone into the public option would create a de facto single payer system since the public option would be govrenment run. (the so called health exchanges was a scam) Of course people freaked over the public option and they were forced to take it out but the goal is still the same and they've set us on that course by: #1 Giving the government no enforcement ability. #2 Tying the hands of the insurance companies and big pharma (both of who win in the short term but will suffer greatly in a few years) They are setting the system up to fail so they can: #1 Of course blame those big meanie Republicans, insurance/drug companies (if any are still around) #2 and claim they need more fixes to and that the only fix is a single payer government run only system In fact if you look at what they just passed.... They passed the Senate bill and already they had to pass fixes for it because under the original plan the Senate bill and the House bill would have gone to committee (like a regular bill) but the election of Scott Brown forced the Democrats to change their plans. Under the new plan the Democrats dropped the House version and the House voted on the Senate version word-for-word (to satisfy the Constitutional requirement). Then the House voted on the fixes and sent the fixes to the Senate and the Senate voted on the fixes. The Senate version of healthcare was considered inferior by the Democrats hence the urge to pass a bill of "fixes". The whole fight these last few weeks was because House Democrats were afraid that the Senate would wreck everything and health care reform would go down in flames. Said before he was even thinking of running for President......
Actually, they CAN take the fine out of any refund you're due. So the answer is to make damned sure you owe them money on April 15. But yeah, there's no money for enforcement. There's no authority to enforce penalties either--even if there was funding.
And here's Democrat, Max Baucus, talking about how healthcare will effect income redistribution : Who is John Galt?
Ohnoes! The skyrocketing incomes of the wealthy won't continue to climb just as fast!!! Now they're going to have to re-enact Atlas Shrugged!!!
Funny, I'm middle class and this clusterfuck doesn't look like it's going to save me a nickel. Quite the contrary, I now expect to pay more and get less...
Anyone else struck by the absurdity of a bunch of rich people talking about the redistribution of wealth?
The mandate comes into force in 2014 if I'm correct. So we have four years to find out if Zombie's conspiracy theory is true.
Indeed. If those fuckers want to impress me, they can commence to give away all their excess money. Kerry can give away his wife's fortune, same with Kucinich. And the Kennedy clain should be able to take care of a big ol' hunk of maldistribution. In fact, I'll be happy to accept a check each year which brings my annual income up to the national mean. Hell then I'll even buy some insurance.
