Saturday, December 28, 2013

Get ready to pay. (Partial list of new taxes)

WASHINGTON — Here comes the ObamaCare tax bill.
The cost of President Obama’s massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills.
Most insurers aren’t advertising the ObamaCare taxes that are added on to premiums, opting instead to discretely pass them on to customers while quietly lobbying lawmakers for a break.
But one insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, laid bare the taxes on its bills with a separate line item for “Affordable Care Act Fees and Taxes.”
The new taxes on one customer’s bill added up to $23.14 a month, or $277.68 annually, according to Kaiser Health News. It boosted the monthly premium from $322.26 to $345.40 for that individual.
The new taxes and fees include a 2 percent levy on every health plan, which is expected to net about $8 billion for the government in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion in 2018.
There’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
Insurers pay a 3.5 percent user fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov Web site.
ObamaCare supporters argue that federal subsidies for many low-income Americans will not only cover the taxes, but pay a big chunk of the premiums.
But ObamaCare taxes don’t stop with health-plan premiums.
Americans also will pay hidden taxes, such as the 2.3 percent medical-device tax that will inflate the cost of items such as pacemakers, stents and prosthetic limbs.
Those with high out-of-pocket medical expenses also will get smaller income-tax deductions.
Americans are currently allowed to deduct expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of their annual income. The threshold jumps to 10 percent under ObamaCare, costing taxpayers about $15 billion over 10 years.
Then there’s the new Medicare tax.
Under ObamaCare, individual tax filers earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 will pay an added 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax. They’ll also pay an extra 3.8 percent Medicare tax on unearned income, such as investment dividends, rental income and capital gains.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration touted a surge of more than 2 million visitors Monday at HealthCare.gov, plus about 250,000 calls to ObamaCare call centers.
“Volumes remain high but not equal to [Monday] and we have not had to deploy our queuing system on the site,” said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, referring to a virtual waiting room that is activated when the site is overloaded.
“We are taking thousands of calls at our call centers, which remain open until midnight, and we are seeing thousands of visitors complete enrollment online,” she said.
It wasn’t smooth sailing for everyone on the troubled site.
Software techie Jeff Karaaro tweeted in frustration: “Got three different codes trying to submit plan choices. No [one] can tell me what they mean. I nor call center can complete my application due to error.”

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous12/28/2013

    don't forget the 2% federal tax on the sale of real estate. Goes into effect on Jan 1

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12/28/2013

    Two thoughts:

    1. The real danger is increased borrowing, not new taxes. Taxpayers will notice and protest increased taxes far more easily than they will notice and protest increased borrowing.

    2. Government spending will quickly decline if we eliminated automatic payroll deduction and required taxpayers to write a monthly check for their share of the tax burden.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous12/29/2013

      I often say we should pay all taxes in one lump sum due the day before elections.

      Delete
    2. Anonymous12/29/2013

      Effectively, we are still under a Bush fiscal policy, or at least its consequences. Still puzzles me how the repeal of the estate tax in 2010 helped to stimulate the economy. It exacerbated wealth concentration, which I think is the greatest threat to the economy. Remember when AIG was bailed out, it had to enter into an agreement not to sue Goldman Sachs and the big banks for fraud. From bail out to recapitalization, we have created banking MONSTERS, who still to this day engage in (a) servicing fraud and (b) fraudclosures. Shocking.

      A simple solution to the health care crisis is MEDICARE FOR ALL, but a Republican Congress would not permit a solution. Even a public option would be far reaching to reduce the costs of health insurance (typically confused with health care).

      The government runs a deficits as a result, in my view, of (a) insufficient tax revenues and (b) overspending. Spending, however, is more of a distant problem. Similar to the alleged insolvency of social security one hundred (100) years from now. In fact, there is a dramatic lack of spending domestically: infrastructure, in particular.

      Everyone---every sole proprietor, business, company, corporation---except for Wall St. gets taxed on its transactions. It is called a sales tax. Wall St. is not taxed for the sale/purchase on its transactions. It is why they are so wealth: tax immune. Huge advantage. A simple Wall St. transaction tax would remedy not only the (a) deficit problem but the (b) national debt.

      Borrowing. The extent that borrowing is a problem. The government loots the Social Security Trust Fund, which generates a profit; this allegedly bankrupt institution. It takes the surpluses out of the trust fund and places into the general fund. It replaces the surplus securities.

      Borrowing is a more complex problem because it depends on who the creditors are. The terms of borrowing. Now, the Fed. Reserve is still engaged in "quantitative easing" to stimulate the economy; this is known as printing money. The Fed just announced like a week ago that it is reducing its creation of money from 85bln to 75bln a month. However, it creates money by monetizing the debt by buying treasury securities from its member banks; this system own helps big banking. Therefore, I would nationalize the Fed Reserve, but this is a somewhat different discussion entirely.

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    3. Anonymous12/29/2013

      You're right I remember when Bush repealed the Estate tax in 2010. I also remember when Bush went from his 250 Billion Dollar Deficits to the 1.0+ trillion dollars deficits while he was still in office in 2010 also.

      "The government runs a deficits as a result,"
      c) When Government revenue can't cover entitlements.

      Anything but reduce entitlements.

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    4. Anonymous12/29/2013

      Thanks for the Socialist viewpoint. What you say however, has many nuggets of facts contained within I will grant you. To say that borrowing is not the problem though defies common sense. We are not under Bush plans and have not been since about 2007 when Democrats took control of most of government and Bush was a complete lame duck. Democrats controlled both Exec and both legislatures until 2010. We tried to spend our way out by increasing govt spending drastically as well as increasing borrowing drastically. These were done by Obama and the Dems. Now their huge spike in spending has become the new normal. This is a house of cards and the borrowing will have to end eventually. The question is how and when. Democrats act as if their is no problem.....or worse that the problem is that the govt is not spending ENOUGH. They are insane. They use the govt to loot the taxes of the people and redistribute them to their voters. READ the above article and ALL the NEW taxes that are coming ALL thanks to Democrats....How do you think a two percentage point increase on ALL housing transactions is going to affect the Real Estate market which has just begun to recover. How many new homes will now become UNAFFORDABLE to some buyers and how many newly reactivated Union plumbers, electricians, drywallers, painters, etc etc....will be DEactivated as housing sales slump ? Govt KILLS jobs....period.

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    5. Anonymous12/29/2013

      Free markets make a free country. The more millionaires the better. If you have a goose that lays golden eggs....and you are hungry....then feed that goose and let it lay a golden egg. Don't ring it is neck and cook it. Marxism and central planning does not work here any better than it has worked in Soviet Union, East Germany, France, England, N Korea, Vietnam, Poland, El Salvador, Cuba, Venezuela, and on and on and on and on.....how many examples do you need to prove that free markets work best ? All the above countries have one important thing in common they are...or have been Socialist economies....

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