Whether or not you now have health insurance, Obama's health care bill will cost you dearly.

If you don't have insurance, you will be required to buy it. The legislation specifies how much you will have to pay for the coverage before any subsidy kicks in. All during the campaign, Obama kept speaking about affordable coverage. Now it appears that his definition of “affordable” might be a bit elastic.

If your household income is $66,000 a year, slightly above the national average, Obama's health care bill will require you to spend 12 percent of your income — about $8,000 a year or almost $700 a month — to buy health insurance before you get any federal subsidy.

Even those making less will have to reach deep into their meager resources to satisfy Obama's statutory requirement. Families scraping by on only $44,0000 a year will have to pay 7 percent of their income (about $3,000) on insurance. Even those making just $33,000 will have to ante up 4.5 percent of their income (about $1,500) for health insurance. The required payments reach so far down the scale that those who are living at the federal poverty level of $22,000 will have to shell out 2 percent of their totally inadequate incomes ($440) for insurance.

That Obama is charging premiums to those living at or on the border of poverty is absolutely incredible! And this from a candidate who pledged that he would not tax the middle class!

  If you have insurance, you will get hit by his proposed 40 percent tax on insurance premiums. 

When the tax — and the legislation — takes effect in 2013, all families making about $120,000 or more in combined household income (14 percent of all families or one in seven) will have to pay the tax.

By the next year, 2014, the tax will hit every family making more than $100,000 (about 18 percent of all families or one in six).

By 2019, 10 years hence, the tax will reach down to affect every family making more than $75,000 a year (31 percent of families or one in three).

  The tax will take 40 percent of all premiums above $21,000. 

So if you don't have insurance, you will be socked with a mandate to buy coverage and pay a hefty proportion of your income to do it; and if you have insurance, you will be hit with an excise tax on the coverage.

(In theory, it is the insurance companies that have to pay the tax, but the Senate Finance Committee “assumes” that they will pass the tax along to their policyholders).

These costs make a mockery of Obama's oft-repeated pledge to avoid any tax increase that would impact those making under $250,000 a year. He finances about half of his health care plan on the backs of the elderly by cutting Medicare and inducing scarcity and the other half by premium taxes and insurance purchasing mandates on the middle and lower middle class.

To find out more about Dick Morris and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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