Hey, look! Even more awesome regulations are pouring out of the ObamaCare mystery machine!
Remember that blatantly unconstitutional penalty that you’re supposed to pay if you don’t buy insurance according to the government’s instructions? Well, they had to pretend that it sometimes magically changes into a “tax” to get it past the Supreme Court, even though the very same President and his top deputies will vehemently insist that it’s not a “tax” if you accuse them of raising taxes on the middle class. In fact, President Obama used to laugh out loud at people who said it was a tax.
It turned out that the individual mandate is a tax whenever the Supreme Court is looking at it, so it falls to the Internal Revenue Service to collect it. Obama hired a huge army of new IRS agents just for this purpose. The IRS just published some helpful guidelines for calculating how much disobedience of the ObamaCare commissars will cost you. Strangely enough, according to CNS News, they call the individual mandate a “penalty” even though it was only held to be constitutional if it was a “tax.” I guess the Supreme Court wasn’t looking when the IRS wrote this stuff.
As part of these guidelines, the IRS had to compute the presumed cost of ObamaCare coverage at four tiers of coverage, known as Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Bronze plans are the El Cheapo discount plans, providing minimum coverage attractive to low-income families.
How much are the Bronze plans going to cost, in the estimation of the IRS, once the full panoply of ObamaCare mandates kicks in by 2016?
$20,000 per year, on average, for two adults and three children.
This figure is deployed in examples telling families how to compute their tax penalties. The penalties would be vastly cheaper than the coverage – about $2,400 in the example provided by the IRS – so the smart play would be to pay your new tax and make do without insurance. Better still, the wise and benevolent commissars of ObamaCare are already talking about arbitrarily allowing poor Americans to slide on the penalties, if they can’t afford their Affordable Care Act coverage.
Isn’t it wonderful that we passed this bill so the people who voted on it could find out what was in it?
