Obamacare Penalties and Premiums Are Rising: What You Need to KnowLily Dane The Obamacare website homepage has an exciting announcement for us! Heres what it says: See plans prices for 2015! How aboutNO. Id rather not, thanks. Like Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper, I am NOT going to comply with Obamacare. Ive said that from the day I first heard about this extortion plan. The mainstream media is alerting us that UH OH!, the second enrollment season is HERE and if you dont comply like a good citizen, youll be facing even BIGGER penalties this time around! From CBS: Americans will see their bank accounts shrink if they dont sign upfor Obamacare in its second enrollment season. Uninsured Americans who decide not to enroll will face a penalty of $325 per person, more than tripling the $95 penalty those who did not enroll had to pay the first time around. Children under the age of 18 will be fined $162.50. The maximum amount an uninsured family will be penalized is $975 under the flat-rate method. Oh, wait theres more! The financial penalty for skipping out on health coverage will more than triple to$325 per person in 2015, or 2 percent of income, depending on whichever is higher(emphasis mine). Note that the maximum amount a family would be penalized under the FLAT RATE method is $975. I dont know about you, but I think thats a LOT of money, especially in this terrible economy. And that flat rate penalty is mostly going to affect lower-income and middle income families. Some middle class families make too much money to qualify for a subsidy, so they will be stuck with a hefty penalty if they cant buy insurance. Once again, the middle class gets slammed. They are damned if they do, damned if they dont. I thought the purpose of the ACA was to HELP lower income families? To make matters even worse, if families who DO qualify for the subsidies use the federal exchange to buy insurance because their state doesnt offer an exchange, they might be out of luck. Thats because the legality of subsidies issued through the federal exchange is in question. The Supreme Court has agreed to rule on this in early 2015, as Mac Slavo reported: The chief aim of the law is to expand health insurance coverage and offer financial assistance to families that cant afford it. Since most states declined to set up their own health insurance exchanges, the federal government was left to set them up instead. As a result, more than two-thirds of the people who had signed up for health insurance of April 30 purchased their insurance from a federal exchange. Among all enrollees, 85 percent received subsidies to help pay for it thats almost 5 million people. The average value of these tax credits was $264 a month, which represents a discount off the sticker price of more than three-quarters. Senior analyst Laura Adams of InsuranceQuotes.com told CBS The penalty is meant to incentivize people to get coverage. This year, I think a lot of people are going to be in for a shock. Is it meant to incentivize us, or to extort us? I think this definition of extortion from FindLaw gives us our answer: Most states define extortion as the gaining of property or money by almost any kind of force, or threat of 1) violence, 2) property damage, 3) harm to reputation, or 4) unfavorable government action. To add insult to injury, the prices for plans are going up WAY up: Its not only the uninsured who will be facing higher costs. Many health-care plans are also charging more, with Investors Business Daily finding that a 27-year-old earning 250 percent of the poverty rate will pay an average of7 percent more for the lowest-cost bronze plan, based on an analysis of rates in the largest city in 34 states. The lowest-cost silver plan will rise an average of 9 percent, while the lowest-priced catastrophic policy will climb 18 percent, the analysis found. Now, for even more shocking numbers The financial site NerdWallet ran some numbers to see how much a lifetime of Obamacare penalties would cost. The title of the article says it all. Study: A Lifetime of Obamacare Penalties Can Total Six Figures Here are some key points from the article: NerdWallet estimated the cost of a lifetime of penalties that is, what penalties might cost for someone who never purchases insurance. Our calculations predict that individuals will pay a minimum of $36,556, and families of four a minimum of $109,668. For 2014, 2015, and 2016, the minimum penalty will be $95, $325, and $695 annually, respectively. After 2016, tax penalties will be calculated based on annual cost of living adjustments determined each year by the Social Security Act. To estimate the lifetime sum of tax penalties, we used two methods: Higher-income uninsured individuals and families will pay much more for the tax penalty. For example, an individual making approximately $200,000 in 2016 will pay an estimated penalty of $4,500-$5,000 for one year. For a startling, in-depth chart that shows estimated penalties per year, and for information on how NerdWallet calculated their projections, please see the full article here. Okay now for some relatively good news. Last December, the Obama administration quietly added some Obamacare exemptions to the individual mandate: The 13th and 14th exemptions are listed on thehardship exemption applicationand read as follows: 13.) You received a notice saying that your current health insurance plan is being cancelled, and you consider the other plans available unaffordable. Documentation required as proof: Copy of notice of cancellation 14.) You experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance. Documentation required: Please submit documentation if possible That hardship exemption form can be found on Healthcare.gov. Heres what I said about the exemption form back in March: For the 14th exemption, what kind of hardship do they mean? Thats very vague wording. And please submit documentationif possible? What if it isnt possible? What if you dont have documentation, and Obamacare itself is simply a hardship for you? Does that mean you are exempt from the extortion tax penalty? I also reported on what some politicians said about the exemptions: House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio,saidthe exemption could cover essentially everyone at a Capitol press conference today: Quietly, without any fanfare, theres a real question whether the White House has just abandoned the individual mandate, the heart of Obamacare itself. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.,accusedthe Obama administration of trying to sneak through a unilateral change to Obamacare which essentially allows anyone who has experienced a hardship in obtaining health insurance to opt out of the individual mandate tax without requiring documentation. And then, theres the whole IRS problem. Last week,IRS Commissioner John Koskinen warned at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) National Tax Conference in Washington, DC that the2015 tax filing seasonwill be one of the most complicated filing seasons weve ever had. The reasons? The IRSs budget has been severely cut by Congress (hey, they got something right for once!). And, now the agency hasincreased responsibilities because of Obamacare. Is anyone surprised? A lot of Americans saw this coming. We predicted that the IRS would not be able to handle administering Obamacare. The agency cant even handle its regular tasks, or finding hidden lost emails. On that note, I find it funny that Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber called American voters stupid. He sort of contradicted himself, didnt he? He called us stupid right after he admitted that a lack of transparency helped pass the ACA. He also bragged about knowing more about the ACA than any other economist, butthen he told a blatant lie about the state exchanges and subsidy eligibility. Both of his flubs were caught on camera. In late September, the Senate Republican Policy Committee posted an article titledObamacare Unleashes IRS on Americans. Here are some disturbing points from that article: The president hasrequestedthat the IRS receive nearly half a billion dollars in fiscal year 2015 to implement Obamacare. In contrast, genuine, consumer-based reform would have improved the countrys health care system without increasing the IRSs power, complicating the tax code, and raising compliance costs for taxpayers. Obamacare dramatically increased the size and power of the IRS an agency shown over the past year to be untrustworthy and partisan and its role in the American health care system. For starters, over the next decade, Obamacarehikedtaxes by more than $1 trillion, through more than 20 tax increases. The IRS faces enormous challenges in implementing these new taxes. For example, last month the Treasury Departments inspector general for tax administrationfoundthat IRS was unable to properly collect the medical device tax. Taxpayers who claim one of the 19 exemptions from the individual mandate must fileForm 8965with the IRS. As many as23 million Americansmay have to file a Form 8965 for the 2014 filing season. The form has 21 boxes for entries for single filers and 78 boxes for entries for married filers with two dependents. Instructionsfor Form 8965 take 12 pages and contain five worksheets. Oh, and guess what? Most of the people who receive subsidies to buy insurance through the exchanges get them in the form of a check sent from the Treasury to their insurance company every month. Those monthly subsidies were based on estimates of what the recipients would earn during the year. So, at tax time, those taxpayers will have to reconcile the amount paid out with how much SHOULD have been paid. In other words, if the Treasury sent too much money to the insurance company on a persons behalf, the IRS is going to go after the TAXPAYER for any overpayment. This is going to happen even though the TREASURY sent too much to the insurance companies! The IRS issued $3.6 billion in potentially fraudulent tax returns for tax year 2011. They are understaffed and under budget and will NOT be able to handle administering Obamacare. For all of these reasons, I will be filing an exemption and opting out of Obamacare. Instead of participating in the racket that Big Government-enforced insurance-based healthcare has become, I will use the Direct Primary Care option. For more on how that system works, please seeMoney Talks, Obamacare Walks: Some Doctors to Accept Cash Only, the Direct Primary Care Coalition website, andDirect Primary Care: An Innovative Alternative to Conventional Health Insurance. Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Her goal is to help people to Wake the Flock Up! 