Romney: "It's Not a Tax!"

[MJ Willett]

I currently pay $800 a month out of pocket for my family's insurance. I'm a public school teacher who makes 55k per year. I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of working middle income people also pay for some kind of monthly insurance either privately or indirectly through their employer. So what is the new tax that people like me are going to be paying? This seems to be the big strategy that republicans are going after but I don't get it.

What's wrong with calling it a tax? Perhaps it's not politically desirable lingo but that is after all what the Supreme Court determined would make it constitutional.

[Haruo]

I'll take Seattle City Light (municipal utility which, even though we are outside the city limits, we are lucky enough to have) over Puget Sound Energy (for-profit utility which most of our county outside Seattle has) any day, and I am sure there are worse ones out there than PSE. Also, we voters (not me, we) just got done privatizing Washington's liquor sales, after an initiative campaign hugely underwritten by Costco, and guess what, liquor prices went up. (Not all of them everywhere, but most of them most places.) Costco has bucked the trend in its own stores, keeping prices below state-liquor-store levels, but their spokesmen have admitted that they can't make money that way... At first people thought prices had gone down, but that was because the private stores sticker prices don't include tax, where the old state liquor stores' shelf tags did include the (whopping, well over 30%) tax. Taxes didn't go up, but accounting methods changed and made briefly for a lot of angry boozers at the checkout registers... Georgia may be different, but William's notion of "gummit" and its effect on prices simply doesn't accord with my perception of my immediate surroundings.

[KeithE]

I currently pay $800 a month out of pocket for my family's insurance. I'm a public school teacher who makes 55k per year. I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of working middle income people also pay for some kind of monthly insurance either privately or indirectly through their employer. So what is the new tax that people like me are going to be paying? This seems to be the big strategy that republicans are going after but I don't get it.

What's wrong with calling it a tax? Perhaps it's not politically desirable lingo but that is after all what the Supreme Court determined would make it constitutional.

Under ObamaCare, you will not be paying “tax” or “penalty” unless you refuse to take one of your state’s health exchange offerings for health insurance. People who make over $200K/year will pay 0.9% more medical payroll tax and those that declare capital gains will have to pay 18.8% Instead of the current $15% for those income gains.

Now we are all subject to increased premiums which have increased by 113% since 2001 ~11%/year under the current system due to health care cost inflation. I do not see that changing appreciably under ObamaCare especially since a deal was struck to not have any controls on premiums cost growth to get the health care insurane companies buy-in. The real relief from this cost growth would come by limiting overtreatment like those countries that have a single payer insurance that closely controls unneeded treatments. Single-payer advocates were not invited to the health care summits in 2010.

[KeithE]

I'll take Seattle City Light (municipal utility which, even though we are outside the city limits, we are lucky enough to have) over Puget Sound Energy (for-profit utility which most of our county outside Seattle has) any day, and I am sure there are worse ones out there than PSE. Also, we voters (not me, we) just got done privatizing Washington's liquor sales, after an initiative campaign hugely underwritten by Costco, and guess what, liquor prices went up. (Not all of them everywhere, but most of them most places.) Costco has bucked the trend in its own stores, keeping prices below state-liquor-store levels, but their spokesmen have admitted that they can't make money that way... At first people thought prices had gone down, but that was because the private stores sticker prices don't include tax, where the old state liquor stores' shelf tags did include the (whopping, well over 30%) tax. Taxes didn't go up, but accounting methods changed and made briefly for a lot of angry boozers at the checkout registers... Georgia may be different, but William's notion of "gummit" and its effect on prices simply doesn't accord with my perception of my immediate surroundings.

My world either Haruo. In the target building arena privatizing with Lockheed Martin has quadrupled the cost and the performance has dropped in several requirements.

Be careful in that world of yours Haruo.

[Sandy]

I currently pay $800 a month out of pocket for my family's insurance. I'm a public school teacher who makes 55k per year. I'd venture a guess that the vast majority of working middle income people also pay for some kind of monthly insurance either privately or indirectly through their employer. So what is the new tax that people like me are going to be paying? This seems to be the big strategy that republicans are going after but I don't get it.

What's wrong with calling it a tax? Perhaps it's not politically desirable lingo but that is after all what the Supreme Court determined would make it constitutional.

You will not be paying a tax. You are paying insurance premiums, and are covered by private insurance. The only way you would pay the penalty/tax would be if you didn't have insurance. Your tax would then provide you with the minimum level of insurance coverage provided by the govenment, as I understand it, an expansion of medicaid, and going along with that would be the same restrictions that medicaid has. So why pay the tax, and get less insurance coverage, when you can buy a lot more insurance coverage for the same amount of money? Not only that, but putting an additional 30 million people in the insurance pool will make premiums go down, not up.

[Haruo]

If I try to drive a car without insurance - and get "popped" - I have to pay a fine and they may also suspend my driver's license. But of course that's the State, not the Feds...

[MJ Willett]

Thanks Sandy and Keith, that's what I assumed. It's only a "tax" in an obscure legal sense related to the insurance mandate. If that's going to be the "big attack" strategy of republicans, it seems like a rather irrelevant bone to pick since very view voters would ever willfully opt out of ALL insurance if they had a choice and are therefore not going to be "taxed."