Affordable Care Act is Unaffordable and Onerous

 

IBDEditorials.com

ObamaCare: Does anyone remember hearing that one of the blessings of health reform would be doing your taxes a second time? Filling out fifteen pages and paying $1 trillion in taxes are just the latest ObamaCare surprises.

'1040" is not most Americans' lucky number. Yet hardly as unlucky as the digits in ObamaCare. The latest is that a three-person family is going to have to fill out a 15-page form to enjoy health benefits, with 21 steps to go through over those pages.

It makes the Internal Revenue Service's 1040 form a stroll in the park by comparison.

Will the government be forced to come up with an E-Z ObamaCare form so that angry Americans don't have to pay H&R Block or an accountant twice every year — once to do their taxes and again to do their ObamaCare?

And unlike your tax return, which is handled by the IRS, your ObamaCare form will be going through no fewer than three agencies of the federal government.

Already, supporters of the law are demanding a multitude of taxpayer-paid employees to help people fill out their forms.

Funny how this feature wasn't touted in selling the medical overhaul to the public back in early 2010.

Liberal Democrats must not have thought people would like hearing that they would have to go to some health care version of the Department of Motor Vehicles and wait in line for an unsmiling bureaucrat's help.

Isn't it odd that the Health and Human Services Department didn't provide any fanfare when it put a full 60 pages on its website this week just to describe all the wonders of the form with which Americans will have to grapple?

Shouldn't there have been a big rollout, led by the president, celebrating what is certain to become the most familiar aspect of the law — The Form?

Soon, The Form will be a term as self-explanatory as The Pill, with no further description necessary for someone to know what you're talking about.

In the meantime comes another ObamaCare surprise: The "Affordable Care Act," with its 21 tax increases, costs twice as much in new taxes as had been advertised.

A nearly 100-page analysis from the government's official revenue estimators at Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation pegs the price tag at over $1 trillion, almost twice the nearly $570 billion suggested when the law was passed by legislative trickery three years ago.

Like everything else that wasteful, corrupt government tries to do, there are cost increases from the previous estimates everywhere you look.

The individual mandate will cost $55 billion, not the $17 billion previously estimated.

The Cadillac tax on higher-cost plans is $111 billion, not $32 billion.

The employer mandate is $106 billion, not the $52 billion cost it was thought.

The health overhaul is shaping up to be exactly what most Americans feared at the time of its passage: an onerous, wildly unaffordable monster whose full nature is yet to be seen.