Dec 29 2012

Compasionate Death Panels

Published by at 11:03 am under All General Discussions,Obamacare

The fact is, the big-government liberals need to find more money to fund their risky and chaotic fantasies (reference the mortgage meltdown that led to the 2008 Great Recession as one example of liberal devastation, and the mountains of Obama-Debt piling up on our children and their children as another example). They are borrowing $1.4 trillion a year now, but that is not nearly enough. So in their greedy quest for more power and money, they of course are targeting the weak, the sick and those with special needs:

Obamacare contains twenty new or higher taxes. Five of the taxes hit for the first time on January 1.

The 30-35 million Americans who use a pre-tax Flexible Spending Account (FSA) at work to pay for their family’s basic medical needs will face a new government cap of $2500. … There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children.  There are several million families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education. This Obamacare tax provision will limit the options available to these families.

Wow. To go from making special needs support tax free to almost none of it now tax free (you can spend $2500 without blinking for a kid with special challenges).

But wait, those scurvy liberals are after more than just the money to help special needs kids

Currently, those Americans facing high medical expenses are allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI).  This tax increase imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI.

2.5% does not sound like a lot – but it is. this is the amount you have to spend BEFORE you get a tax deduction on medical expenses. So if you are seriously sick and living on take home pay of $40,000 a year (AGI), now you can deduct medical expenses after you spend $3,000. Under the wonders of Obama care, you have to spend $4,000 before you get a deduction. Heaven help those who spend, on average, $4,500 a year under this model. They loose the tax deduction on 2/3rds there current deduction rate (going from $1500 to $500). As the article notes, those hit by this tax hike (coming no matter what) are:

By limiting this deduction, Obamacare widens the net of taxable income for the sickest Americans.  This tax provision will most harm near retirees and those with modest incomes but high medical bills.

And never a champion of the little guy or gal, liberals look to give a break to their own big corporation backers:

The Medicare payroll tax is currently 2.9 percent on all wages and self-employment profits.  Under this tax hike, wages and profits exceeding $200,000 ($250,000 in the case of married couples) will face a 3.8 percent rate instead. This is a direct marginal income tax hike on small business owners, who are liable for self-employment tax in most cases.

You know Hollywood backs the liberal left. And we all know most of the horrors of corporate greed, corruption and abuse in the real world come from Hollywood (home of the ‘casting couch’) and Las Vegas (anyone really think organized crime is not sucking the life out of people’s life savings). You don’t know fun until you have seen a aged person, in a wheel chair sucking on oxygen, cramming money into a slot machine. Nothing like it in the world!</sarcasm>

The truth of the matter is, if you look at Hollywood, Show Business, Green Energy (like Solyndra) and so many other liberal leaning corporations, you find the graft, corruption and crudeness of a bad movie. If you look at medical companies, aerospace companies, defense contractors, etc. you tend to find a lot less of the ugly side of making money. No one is pure and holy, but the rich left and their corporate entities tend to be a bit seedier than the average family business. To me at least.

So all this ‘soak the rich’ crap is a PR stunt. The rich have tax loop holes and hidey-holes. Especially the lefty rich (and especially the corporate Hollywood left). Many rich don’t have ‘income’. So while Obama pretends he wants to soak the rich, he is really soaking the sick, the poor, the elderly, those with special needs. Plus those trying to build the American dream on their own.

I have one word for this: Exposed!

BTW – just wait until the cost cutting in services hits. Premiums are already skyrocketing, which means people will be forced to cut back on coverage. And of course, there is more stealing from our children:

The newly announced rules limit insurers to charge their oldest customers no more than three times as much as younger ones. As shown in the following chart based on estimates by international management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the rule will force insurers to hike rates for 18- to 24-year-olds by 45 percent even as rates for those 60 and older drop by 13 percent in most states.

I fear for our kids. We are stealing their livelihoods so we can live better. The damage is already being felt by Gen Y in the form of lower pay, fewer good careers, etc.

Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives turning into detours and dead ends. Average incomes for individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8 percent, double the adult population’s total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1 percentage point above the national figure.

While the WWII generation will be known as “The Greatest”, I fear the ones that follow will be known as “The Deadbeats”

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