And it’s a pricy one. Grace Marie-Turner and Tyler Hartsfield explain:
Despite the president’s promise that middle-income Americans would be protected, they do pay because, as bank-robber Willie Sutton said, that’s where the money is.
For example, parents of children with special needs face an added ObamaCare tax. The law caps at $2,500 a year the amount of income that employees can put tax free into their Flexible Spending Accounts. Thousands of families with special-needs children who have large medical and educational costs now must pay expenses above the cap with after-tax dollars.
People with high medical bills also face a new limit on what they can deduct for medical expenses — a threshold of 10% of their adjusted gross income instead of the old 7.5% trigger. Together, these taxes will raise about $43 billion over 10 years.
ObamaCare also imposes a new sales tax on health insurance companies that already is increasing health insurance premiums. The tax is assessed on insurers based upon the premiums the companies collected in the previous year.
The tax will raise $8 billion in 2014, increasing to $14.3 billion in 2018, and rising thereafter based on premium trend. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the health insurance tax will exceed $100 billion over the next 10 years, virtually all of which will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher premiums.
If I asked you to wake me when the savings kick in, I’d make Rip Van Winkle look like Ed Okin.
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