The Year of ObamaCare:Here Comes the ObamaCare Tax Avalanche
By Arnold Ahlert
CanadaFreePress.com
Thursday, January 2, 2014
As of January 1, ObamaCare is the law of the land. Or more accurately, those parts of ObamaCare that weren’t unilaterally changed or delayed to serve the interests of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party heading in the 2014 election.
Despite those efforts, it would appear that 2014 will bring no respite from the criticism associated with what might be best described as the biggest government boondoggle of all time. As the nation straddles the passage from the old year into the new, the hits just keep on coming.
The first hit concerns the exchanges themselves. As Forbes Magazine contributor Michael Cannon explains, ObamaCare enrollments remain a whopping 60 percent below the targets set by the Obama administration. Only 2.2 million Americans out of the 3.3 million envisioned by the administration have signed up, not paid up. That means the 2.2 million figure will eventually be lower, since no program has a 100 percent success rate in that regard. Thus the administration’s notion that they can meet their target of 7 million paying customers by March 31 (of which 2.7 million must be “young invincibles” to offset the costlier coverage for older, sicker Americans) looks like a pipe dream. Furthermore, since the 60 percent number is a national average, states with low enrollment totals will undoubtedly see a surge in premium costs by 2015.
Two other hits come courtesy of Democrats. On Monday, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) managed a “two-fer” in that regard, unscoring the low enrollment numbers, and insulting her constituency in the process. “There are millions of people out there who think [ObamaCare] was repealed, so there was no way to break through that very easily,” she told MSNBC, adding that the “debacle of a website…seemed to confirm that it must have been repealed, or should have been repealed.” Norton was positive that once the fines for not obtaining insurance kick in, “you’re going to see people trotting to sign on like you’ve never seen it before,” she predicted.
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