Pity the parents who have two children and earn $89,000 per year. They are members of America's last true victim class -- the unsubsidized ones.
These are the Americans who pay for every thing the federal government does but receive in return only those general benefits that derive from the few federal activities that actually serve the common good -- such as incarcerating terrorists at Guantanamo or securing our borders against illegal aliens.
Obamacare will bring a big, expensive surprise for these unsubsidized ones.
Provided you suspend disbelief and accept the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office, the version of the health care plan approved by the Senate Finance Committee complies with President Obama's vow that the plan will not increase the federal deficit.
Under this bill, the government will force individuals to buy health insurance but not employers.
If it is enacted, people earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level would qualify for a federal subsidy to buy health insurance. But they would only receive this subsidy if their employer decided not to provide them with health insurance and they agreed to use the subsidy to buy a federally approved plan in the federally regulated exchange.
Employers who choose not to provide workers with health insurance will pay a price -- in the form of fee payable to the government for every one of their workers who ends up using a federal subsidy to buy insurance. But, according to the bill, the sum of all fees any employer pays cannot exceed $400 times the total number of workers on the employer's payroll.
So employers will face a choice: Pay many thousands of dollars per worker to private health insurance companies, or pay $400 per worker to the government.
This is an offer employers cannot refuse. Predictably, companies all over America will dump their private health insurance and force most of their workers into the government system.
Where will that leave the unsubsidized ones? They will soon discover that the federal government is attacking their family finances on two new fronts -- through the taxes they must pay to fund the new national health care system and through the premiums they must pay to buy their own insurance.
As determined by the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal poverty level this year for a family of four is $22,050. A family earning 400 percent of that makes $88,200 per year.
That means a mom and dad with two children who earn $89,000 per year will be too rich to receive a federal subsidy to help them buy health insurance, but not so poor the government won't tax them to help buy health insurance for the family down the street that makes only $79,000 per year.
Since the unsubsidized family's employer has cancelled its insurance plan, the unsubsidized family will also have to come up with many thousands of dollars to buy their own plan to comply with Obamacare's unconstitutional mandate that they do so.
In the lying language of the left, this will be called anything but a tax increase. In plain English, it is one -- and a massive one at that.
America is now in danger of becoming a nation of three classes: Those on the dole, those who pay for the dole and those who reap political power by maintaining and expanding the dole.
Such a system cannot be sustained. The more the political class pushes to expand the size and benefits of the dole-taking class, the more the unsubsidized ones will be squeezed and stressed. There is only so much welfare state middle-class Americans can carry on their backs. With Medicare and Social Security already facing more than $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities -- that will either not be met or covered by massive new taxes on the unsubsidized ones -- the coming national financial crisis is not only easily foreseeable, it will be hastened if Obamacare is enacted.
The unsubsidized class is stirring in America -- and well it should be. It is time for hard-working, self-reliant, freedom-loving, middle-class people -- people who never want to go on the government's permanent health care dole -- to tell Congress: No to your bogus health care reform. Leave us alone.
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