WASHINGTON — Here comes the ObamaCare tax bill.
The cost of President Obama’s
massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up
on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills.
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.
ObamaCare
supporters argue that federal subsidies for many low-income Americans
will not only cover the taxes, but pay a big chunk of the premiums.
But ObamaCare taxes don’t stop with health-plan premiums.
Americans
also will pay hidden taxes, such as the 2.3 percent medical-device tax
that will inflate the cost of items such as pacemakers, stents and
prosthetic limbs.
Those with high out-of-pocket medical expenses also will get smaller income-tax deductions.
Americans
are currently allowed to deduct expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of
their annual income. The threshold jumps to 10 percent under ObamaCare,
costing taxpayers about $15 billion over 10 years.
Then there’s 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.
Meanwhile,
the Obama administration touted a surge of more than 2 million visitors
Monday at HealthCare.gov, plus about 250,000 calls to ObamaCare call
centers.
“Volumes
remain high but not equal to [Monday] and we have not had to deploy our
queuing system on the site,” said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, referring to a virtual
waiting room that is activated when the site is overloaded.
“We
are taking thousands of calls at our call centers, which remain open
until midnight, and we are seeing thousands of visitors complete
enrollment online,” she said.
It wasn’t smooth sailing for everyone on the troubled site.
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