Maybe this is a "Math is Hard" thing.. but Michelle was looking around to figure out what the exemptions are for the penal-tax-y on Obamacare..
Kaiser has this fun little flowchartIf you are an "undocumented immigrant" ( lets call them what they are : criminals.) , incarcerated ( a criminal) , a member of an Indian Tribe, you don't file income tax because your income is too low to require it OR..
Your health insurance costs more than 8% of your income. If the Bronze plan does, indeed, cost 20K per year for a family of four-- that would mean that you must earn $250K before the penalty would apply. But wait, how many households is that?
Of course, I turn to
Political Calculations to find out..
$250,000+ is the top 2% of households.
Get that? If the Bronze plan really is 20K, and you don't buy it, you pay no penalty if your household income is 250K or below. Which is 98% of all households.
UPDATE:
There are 121 Million households so 2.4 Million will be affected. Of those, many may choose to pay the penalty, as the penalty will still be less than the 20K policy, which you can get anytime you need it. Once you earn $800,000, you may as well purchase the Bronze plan. So the Top 0.2% of earners just top out there. So approximately 2.2 Million people decide to pay the penalty- and their incomes range from 250K to 800K. If was assume an even distribution, and the average income is 525K, at maximum penalty in the 3rd year, each household owes around $13,000 and total tax collected? About 28 Billion. To pay the health care costs of the entire nation -
estimated at over 2 trillion and growing.. This is going to go off the rails so damn fast.. No one under $250K needs to purchase insurance , unless they get sick, so the entire health care costs of the nation will fall on those between 98% and 99.8% percentiles
Am I missing something that invalidates the above? Math is hard.
UPDATE 2: But wait, wait. I am only going to purchase insurance under 250K IF I GET SICK ENOUGH- I mean seriously sick. As in I need over 20K worth of care sick. So Obama, the Anti-gun, Anti 2nd amendment gun salesman of the year - might have returned the vast majority of the health care system to a market economy. I need to go see the doctor. I don't pay 20K a year for insurance. I owe no penalty for not buying insurance. I pay the doctor out of pocket.. and health care costs do come down because the insurance industry is basically gone..
Obama is a free market messiah! Of course the poor only get a subsidy toward the purchase of insurance -- not money in pocket - so they can't afford to go and see the doctor, and the non-contributing zeros die! A plan worthy of the Neo-Con Bush.
Anyone see a problem with that reasoning?
