Great American Health Insurance Tax

I don’t know how many people have made the connection just yet, but this thing with so-called “Health Care Reform” is apparently nothing more than a taxation mandate aimed at forcing people to either purchase health insurance, or to face being fined for failing to do so. Rhetoric at this point in the game is suggesting that such fines will range somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 for a family who fails to pay their health insurance premiums, which is assumed to become an act of law in 2014. No word yet as far as I know on what constitutes a “family” (e.g., 2 people; 3 people; head of household, etc.).

This is not the same as the requirement under law in most states that mandate the purchase of automobile insurance, since first of all there is no requirement to own a car. And a person can actually own cars without purchasing automobile insurance just so long as the vehicles are not driven along public roadways.

If a driver is involved in an accident in a state that does require automobile insurance and cannot provide proof of insurance following a collision, then that person will typically face a stiff fine. By the same token, if a person is detained by police during a routine traffic stop and proof of insurance cannot be shown, then the person will also typically be faced with paying a sizeable fine.

The above two (2) ideals both make sense: If a person is performing, or contributing to the performance of, a material action that is illegal (e.g., driving a car without insurance), then it can reasonably be shown where a physical transgression took place that is against the law. But that is NOT what we are talking about when we say that it would (or will) be illegal to not pay for health insurance, since a physical act would have never taken place.

Again, the simple and realistic analogy here is one of – “TAXATION.” The fact of a person being found guilty for failure to pay state or federal taxes often times does not require an action to have taken place (e.g., such as with purposely falsifying tax receipts). A person may not pay the correct amount of tax in simple terms, in which case a transgression took place due to “inaction” on the part of the person to pay the tax that was due. Therefore, when it would come to a mandate aimed at forcing people to pay a health insurance premium, failure to do so can equally be said to amount to a fact of “inaction” the same as can be attributed to any inaction of failure to pay a state, federal or local tax debt.

In pondering this consideration in my mind that what we are seeing taking place here is nothing more than a tax initiative giving free reign on the part of health insurance provider companies everywhere to effectively put their hands straight into the wallets of the American people (both rich and poor) when it would come to forcing the payment of insurance premiums, it was subsequently on the evening of Monday, March 22, 2010, while I was watching the monologue performance of Mr. Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, that he offered a brief – albeit serious – remark to suggest that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will actually be the institution responsible for carrying out certain instrumental legal reporting requirements on the behalf of taxpayers everywhere who would be required to pay for such health care insurance.

Now why didn’t I think of that before? Of course, it was all making sense to me (after hearing Mr. Jay Leno make the comment) that the IRS should be responsible for the integration and implementation of this new “Health Care Tax Law,” since resolving any questions involving taxes – both generally and specifically – is what the IRS does best.

Mr. Leno’s comments were very brief, naturally, and although I am a faithful viewer of the Tonight Show who can easily tell when Mr. Leno is joking and when he is not completely joking, I still didn’t want to make mention of his comments here without first researching the subject on the Internet. In doing so, the following link from Fox News offers to provide some prima facie evidence of just how the IRS is going to be intimately involved when it comes to the implementation and ongoing legal maintenance requirements considerate of the Health Care Reform Act…

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/22/irs-serve-health-reform-enforcer-lacks-authority-enforce/

At least one very big difference between the mandating of mandatory health care insurance and that of mandatory automobile insurance is that the latter form of insurance is not mandated under federal law; and it is at the discretion and responsibility of the respective states to either implement such automobile insurance requirements or to not implement them. In fact, according to a Wikipedia article on the subject, as well as one other article, apparently the State of New Hampshire still does not require motorists to carry automobile insurance, which frankly surprised me to a good degree. I had thought that all the states in the union were in on that particular insurance mandate.

As of the date of this writing, we currently have about 17 states that are in the process of serving lawsuits against the federal government for passage of the Health Care Reform Act. These states are filing suit under the premise that the Act is effectively unconstitutional in terms; and the suits are inclusive of presuming a violation of the U.S. Constitution itself to regard the 10th Amendment, as well as to presume or assume a violation of those respective states’ constitutional requirements. My first guess, therefore, is that if the federal government had attempted to mandate a federal requirement for motorists to carry automobile insurance, then we may likely have seen these same sorts of lawsuits way back about 30 years ago when those first state laws were passed regarding mandatory auto insurance coverage.

I fail to see a reasonable difference between a federal mandate for mandatory health care insurance and that of any presumed federal mandate that could theoretically have taken place regarding automotive insurance. I mean, in simple terms, insurance is insurance no matter what form it takes – or at least that is what I had always assumed.

So why not make “DENTAL INSURANCE” a federal requirement while we’re at it? After all, the condition of “periodontal disease” is a determined medical condition that can and does have serious health implications in many people; and there are an awful lot of people out there with really bad teeth. In fact, medical research has shown that the occurrence of unchecked and long-term periodontal disease in adults ends up leading to higher incidents of Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, stroke and other ailments that are clearly of a medical nature in the sense of peoples’ overall physical health. In short, when a person has rotten teeth, the fact of the rotting teeth tends to create a condition for which “poisons” are literally deposited into the affected person’s stomach; and poisons that are created because of rotting teeth are also deposited directly into an affected person’s blood stream by way of the gum tissue. (Have you ever noticed how people with chronically bad teeth almost seem to be mentally retarded even though they probably are not retarded in the true sense of the word? This is a truism. People with long-term, rotting teeth are not all there “upstairs,” so to speak.)

It doesn’t make any practical sense that the federal government would want to mandate this bill for mandatory health insurance, per se, without also mandating an identical bill for dental insurance.

One of the long and short arguments for this whole endeavor that I believe will quickly prove to become a genuine falsehood is of that regarding Mr. President Obama’s effective punch line statement in which he has apparently suggested that if a person – or a business – prefers to hold a current health care insurance plan, then such people are free to keep up with the current plan and that nothing needs to be changed.

But I don’t believe things are even remotely likely to actually turn out that way; and again, the simple analogous argument to this premise comes right back to the ideal of mandatory automotive insurance. That is to say, when states adopted mandatory automotive insurance practices, the next thing everybody knew is that they were faced with purchasing “MINIMIM AMOUNTS OF LIABILITY” insurance coverage. People could – and can – buy their auto insurance from any insurance provider they wish to, but they must conform to minimum standards of coverage (e.g., 100k; 300k, etc).

Conversely, I firmly don’t believe that we should expect to see any different sort of circumstances evolve when it would come to the procurement of health insurance coverage among Americans under such mandatory requirements. For one thing, the assumption of premium costs relative to ANY AND ALL forms of insurance have ALWAYS been based on risk factoring being taken into consideration; and there is no reason for anyone to expect that such diverse factoring is going to change.

If you are a driver who is constantly getting into accidents (even if those accidents are not your fault), then you can expect your car insurance rates to skyrocket. If you are a cigarette smoker, then you can expect the cost of your health insurance and life insurance premiums to be higher than if you were not a smoker. And by the same token, if you are 58 years old and paying for your “mandatory” health care coverage under the Obama plan, then there is absolutely NO REASON to expect that your health insurance is not going to be more expensive than if you were instead only 18 years old.

Also, I haven’t heard anyone even remotely suggesting that these age-old risk-factoring adjustments adopted by insurance companies are going to change just because health insurance coverage has become mandatory. The only thing it is likely to mean is that if you are 58 or 68 years old and are being forced to pay for your own health insurance, then there is every reason to believe that you will be paying an arm and a leg in more money than if you were 18 or 28 years old.

Among those other questions that seem to pose a quagmire of likely – and possibly unparalleled (at least in my view) – concern for how people are going to be held accountable for the payment of their “fair share” of health care premiums, one such good question to earmark would be the involvement of such unfortunate circumstances as when people get laid off from work, or even for people who are fired from their positions of employment.

As such, and according to my understanding for the new health care plan, you would not lose your health care coverage just because you lost your job. Okay, that is possibly great news to know, but if it was your employer who was paying your health care insurance while you were still employed, then who is going to be responsible for the payment of your insurance premiums after you lose your job?

You won’t be able to afford the cost of health insurance if you are subsisting solely on an unemployment benefits’ check payment of about $300.00 a week. Your former employer certainly won’t be able to afford the upkeep of your insurance premium payments if you are no longer working for the company. And the government isn’t saying anything about filling in the payment gap for you – or to fill in the gap for your past employer – until you can find a new job.

So what happens there? Could it be that YOU would be required to “retroactively” pay those monthly premiums at such time that you were to finally find another job? If that were the case, and let’s suppose you ended up being unemployed for a full six-month term, then you could easily owe MORE MONEY in retroactive insurance premium payments (e.g., at a rough estimated cost of $400.00 a month) than the total post-tax value of your weekly unemployment benefits’ payments. And wouldn’t that be wonderful news for you?

My argument here is that this governmental mandatory health care coverage amounts to nothing more than a new – and VERY HEAVY – form of taxation. However, the very notable difference between this form of taxation and that of employment taxes, for instance, is that if you are not working then there is no question in understanding that you will not be liable for owing any taxes, since you would not have earned any money. On the other hand, and with the understanding that you would still be receiving the value of health insurance coverage benefits in lieu of any premium payments being made to the insurance company for those benefits (i.e., because you are unemployed and because your former employer can’t afford to pay benefits on an unemployed person), then the math is simple enough to do in further understanding that SOMEONE is going to have to cough up that money from somewhere.

The thing that intrigues me is that no one (as far as I know) is saying anything about where completely lost revenues from delinquent and unpaid insurance premiums are going to come from; and again, Obama himself HAS NOT suggested that this type of money will be coming from the federal government.

But perhaps the final outcome will indeed be hinged on the ideal of Mr. Obama’s landmark remark made during his recent address, in which he stated, to the effect, “I guess we’ll all just have to look around for the next six months or so and see if ARMAGEDDON really does happen after all,” as a result of the passage of this truly historic new Health Care Reform Act being signed into law.