Will amnesty undermine ♡bamaCare!!!? Elizabeth Price Foley and David B. Rivkin Jr. explain:
This massive influx of now-lawful workers will predictably reduce job opportunities for U.S. citizens and lawful residents. But beyond this obvious negative impact, granting work permits to these individuals will have a subtler, equally pernicious effect: It will encourage employers to hire these 6 million individuals over U.S. citizens and legal residents. This is due to Obamacare’s structure.
Under Obamacare, employers must pay a tax — called the “employer responsibility” tax — if they either fail to offer insurance altogether, or they offer “substandard” insurance. The employer responsibility tax is hefty, ranging between $2,000 to $3,000 per year, and is payable for every full-time employee who buys health insurance on an exchange and receives a tax subsidy as a result. The idea is to incentivize employers to offer generous insurance coverage, thus keeping workers off the exchanges, and away from tax subsidies. If no full-time worker receives a tax subsidy for buying health insurance, the employer will pay no employer responsibility tax.
Under this scheme, the “ideal” worker — in terms of minimizing exposure to the employer responsibility tax — is a worker who is incapable of obtaining a tax subsidy for buying health insurance. Who are these workers? One large category is the 6 million immigration action beneficiaries.
♡bamaCare!!! was about expanding Medicaid, whipping the upper-midde-class into line, and paying off favorite constituents like Big Insurance, the AMA, a loony “alternative” medicine practitioners. It was never meant to be solvent beyond the trickery used to get the CBO to score it nicely. So: Mission Accomplished.
Amnesty is about adding more Democrat/Dependency voters to the rolls, over the objections of the vast majority of the American people and without any legal authority from Congress — which is supposed to write our immigration and naturalization laws. Given the supine nature of much of the GOP majority, amnesty seems likely to go through as well. So: Mission Accomplished.
The only thing being undermined here is the will of the American people, and the finances of the American Republic.
Which makes this all little more than Business As Usual.
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