Along with the higher out-of-pocket costs associated with getting health insurance via the Obamacare exchanges, there are brand-new taxes hitting America thanks to the president’s signature legislation. For example, there will be taxes on insurance companies, which of course will be passed along to the consumer:
Most insurers aren’t advertising the ObamaCare taxes that are added on to premiums, opting instead to discretely pass them on to customers while quietly lobbying lawmakers for a break.
But one insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, laid bare the taxes on its bills with a separate line item for “Affordable Care Act Fees and Taxes.”
The new taxes on one customer’s bill added up to $23.14 a month, or $277.68 annually, according to Kaiser Health News. It boosted the monthly premium from $322.26 to $345.40 for that individual.
The new taxes and fees include a 2 percent levy on every health plan, which is expected to net about $8 billion for the government in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion in 2018.
There’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
Insurers pay a 3.5 percent user fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov Web site.
These taxes are part of a little trick politicians love to fall back on. They tax a corporation and pretend not to notice or acknowledge that those taxes are passed along to the consumer. In actuality, such laws are designed to tax the private citizen but they get “political cover” by being filtered through a middleman.
Another of the new taxes is the sneaky senior tax, aka, the 2.3% medical-device tax that will inflate the cost of items such as wheelchairs, pacemakers, stents, and prosthetic limbs. These costs will again be absorbed by the consumer, who in this case will predominantly be senior citizens.
Americans are currently allowed to deduct expenses that exceed 7.5% of their annual income. The threshold jumps to 10% under Obamacare, meaning fewer deductions. The cost to taxpayers is projected to be about $15 billion over 10 years.
Also about to hit consumers is the new Medicare tax:
Under ObamaCare, individual tax filers earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 will pay an added 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax. They’ll also pay an extra 3.8 percent Medicare tax on unearned income, such as investment dividends, rental income and capital gains.
