Americans Pay IRS Penalty to Escape From ObamaCare

Even the New York Times is conceding that the huge number of Americans willing to pay a special tax to escape from ObamaCare is newsworthy, although the paper tries to sugar-coat the bad news as much as possible:

Two years after the Affordable Care Act began requiring most Americans to have health insurance, 10.5 million who are eligible to buy coverage through the law’s new insurance exchanges were still uninsured this fall, according to the Obama administration.

That number appears to be shrinking: Administration officials said last month that about 2.5 million new customers had bought insurance through HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange serving 38 states, since open enrollment began on Nov. 1. The number of new enrollees is 29 percent higher than last year at this time, suggesting that the threat of a larger penalty may be motivating more people to get covered.

But plenty of healthy holdouts remain, and their resistance helps explain why insurers are worried about the financial viability of the exchanges over time. They say they sorely need more healthy customers to balance out the costs of covering the sicker, older people who have flocked to exchange plans.

Translation: people won’t buy Obama’s lousy insurance, not even when forced to buy it at gunpoint. Obvious left-wing solution: use bigger guns.

This is one of the biggest disasters in the history of American government, and that’s saying something. It’s also one of the biggest lies ever peddled to the American people. ObamaCare is fraud on an unprecedented scale. Remember, it was sold to the American public as a voluntary exercise – “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period.” Barack Obama smugly assured skeptics that his health care plan would be so awesome that millions of Americans would rush to drop their old plans and buy into ObamaCare, saving thousands of dollars in the process.

Instead, premiums are up, and sky-high deductibles make the resulting health “coverage” virtually useless. The only reason many people are buying into this scheme is that Obama is frog-marching them into it. The New York Times analysis frankly acknowledges that word-of-mouth isn’t helping.

People aren’t embracing the Affordable Care Act. The only thing “improving” its catastrophically low enrollment figures is the threat of higher penalties… which could not have been assessed in the first couple of years, because that would have triggered a full-blown revolt against Obama and his party.

The penalties already paid represent one of the biggest tax increases on the middle class in living memory, precisely as ObamaCare critics warned… and it’s a tax people are paying for the “privilege” of getting nothing. They’d rather pay the IRS than give the money to Barack Obama’s cronies in the insurance industry for a low-quality product.

That means it’s time to roll out the scare tactics. “We understand some people may be thinking through their choice of coverage, but going without health insurance is a serious gamble that can be catastrophic if wrong,” argued Health and Human Services spokesman Ben Wakana.

Ah, the fearsome battle cry of the Obama ineptocracy: You little people are stupid and don’t know what’s good for you.

On the contrary, the people passing up on ObamaCare are making entirely rational decisions. They’re voting with their wallets, and if they vote the same way with their ballots in 2016, we can finally end this nightmare.

The NYT article begins with the example of an engineer named Clint Murphy who concluded it’s still better to pay the higher 2016 penalty than to purchase pricey health insurance – in fact, he describes the decision as a no-brainer.

Another subject of the article, 61-year-old Susan Reardon, said she figures it’s better to pay the tax penalty and pay for her fibromyalgia medicine out-of-pocket than shell out over $12,000 in premiums and deductibles for useless ObamaCare coverage. She felt it’s “better just to die” if something catastrophic happens to her, and challenged the IRS to “come and get me” for the Obama tax.

Some of the other unhappy campers interviewed by the Times described themselves as living in fear because ObamaCare has forced them to make do without health insurance. Some were willing to pay the inflated Obama premiums at first, but bailed out as soon as they actually tried to use their “benefits” and were hit with jaw-dropping deductibles. What ringing endorsements of the President’s scheme!

Incidentally, even though Congress refused to give Obama’s cronies a fat taxpayer bailout in the omnibus spending bill – one of the very few good things about it – the Administration is still looking for ways to go around the Constitution and loot the Treasury to cover what it calls an “obligation of the U.S. government for which full payment is required.”

If we don’t kill ObamaCare soon, we will get shaken down for billions of dollars to prop up the insurance companies… and that will become another epic middle-class tax increase, on top of the one we’ve already been hit with, to sustain a scheme very few taxpayers approve of.

All of the Democrats’ political spin evaporates before the amazing number of people who are willing to pay a special tax to exercise the rights that were taken away from them in 2010.