How bad can Obamacare get? What’s its effect on the U.S. economy? Mark Steyn’s NRO post, Obamacare Dystopia, gives us a slight indication: When the Bush Medicare Drug plan was added there were many retiree plans that included drug benefits. To incentivize those companies from dumping their retirees on the new Medicare drug plan, “Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the const of the plan.” That has changed.
“Ask yourself this: If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company’s costs “will increase in the short term.” And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription-drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far just three companies — Deere, Caterpillar, and ValeroEnergy— have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. There are an additional 3,500 businesses presently claiming the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we’re roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees.”
This is all so silly when you think that the tax favored employee medical insurance system has no reasonable basis in economics. It is compensation and should be treated as such, but isn’t under our tax law. And this is the source of our problems. But rather than acknowledge this and put consumers in control, Obama has chosen to put government in control regardless of the costs. Dependency is created.
Mark goes onto treat the facts that we can’t afford Obamacare given our current near bankrupt status with Democratic welfare unfunded liabilities and that this will inevitably bring a VAT tax added to our current tax structure that will doom us to peon status. He then looks ahead:
“All of the above is pretty much a safe bet. What about the imponderables? Even Obama hasn’t yet asked the CBO to cost out, say, what happens to the price of oil when the Straits of Hormuz are under a de facto Iranian nuclear umbrella — as they will be soon, because the former global hyperpower, which now gets mad over a few hundred housing units in Jerusalem, is blasé and insouciant about the wilder shores of the mullahs’ dreams. Or suppose, as seems to be happening, the Sino-Iranian alliance were to result in a reorientation of global oil relationships, or the Russo-Iranian friendship bloomed to such a degree that, between Moscow’s control of Europe’s gas supply and Teheran’s new role as Middle Eastern superpower, the economy of the entire developed world becomes dependent on an alliance profoundly hostile to it.”
Obama has set his course to ruin this nation. Pray that he fails!