Democrats making health care less affordable

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:

Whether or not you now have health insurance, Obama’s health care bill will cost you dearly.

If you don’t have insurance, you will be required to buy it. The legislation specifies how much you will have to pay for the coverage before any subsidy kicks in. All during the campaign, Obama kept speaking about affordable coverage. Now it appears that his definition of “affordable” might be a bit elastic.

If your household income is $66,000 a year, slightly above the national average, Obama’s health care bill will require you to spend 12 percent of your income -- about $8,000 a year or almost $700 a month -- to buy health insurance before you get any federal subsidy.

Even those making less will have to reach deep into their meager resources to satisfy Obama’s statutory requirement. Families scraping by on only $44,0000 a year will have to pay 7 percent of their income (about $3,000) on insurance. Even those making just $33,000 will have to ante up 4.5 percent of their income (about $1,500) for health insurance. The required payments reach so far down the scale that those who are living at the federal poverty level of $22,000 will have to shell out 2 percent of their totally inadequate incomes ($440) for insurance.

That Obama is charging premiums to those living at or on the border of poverty is absolutely incredible! And this from a candidate who pledged that he would not tax the middle class!

If you have insurance, you will get hit by his proposed 40 percent tax on insurance premiums.

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These costs make a mockery of Obama’s oft-repeated pledge to avoid any tax increase that would impact those making under $250,000 a year. He finances about half of his health care plan on the backs of the elderly by cutting Medicare and inducing scarcity and the other half by premium taxes and insurance purchasing mandates on the middle and lower middle class.

These higher costs will also lead to more limited coverage for many, especially the elderly. Democrats are using a "crisis" to impose control freak government health care and raise costs for almost everyone who now has coverage. That cannot be what voters had in mind last year. What they will have in mind if this monstrosity is imposed on them should become clear in 2010.