Tag: "tax"

ObamaCare Health Insurance Fee Will Increase Family Premium $240 in 2014

Robert Book of the American Action Forum has a new analysis of ObamaCare’s annual fee on health insurance:

  • The amount of the “annual fee” tax on health insurers is $8 billion for 2014, $11.3 billion in 2015 and 2016, $13.9 billion in 2017, and $14.3 billion in 2018. Amounts for years after 2018 are set by a statutory formula.
  • The tax will result in a premium increase of $60 to $160 per person in 2014, rising to $100-$300 by 2018, for the average insured individual — and over $260 per family in 2014, rising to over $450 in 2018, for families with employer-sponsored, fully-insured coverage.
  • The tax applies to individually purchased insurance (through exchanges or otherwise), fully insured employer-sponsored plans, Medicare Advantage, and Medicaid managed care.
Mar 05, 2014 | 16 comments | by

Hits and Misses

Is the surge in ADHD drugs the result of pressure to increase student test scores?

Should the sale of a woman’s unfertilized egg be taxed as ordinary income, or as a capital gain? HT: Tyler Cowen.

In contrast to health care.gov, business on a private exchange is booming.

In the exchange: only 19 percent of enrollees are choosing the cheapest (bronze) plans, while 7 percent are picking the most expensive.

Are Democratic candidates running away from ObamaCare?

Feb 24, 2014 | 16 comments | by

ObamaCare Taxes Will Sock It to Low-Income Families

President Obama’s campaign promise:

I can make a firm pledge under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

Chris Conover comments:

There’s 21 different taxes stuffed into ObamaCare designed to raise more than $1 trillion in taxes over the next decade. Last October I showed that only 30% of these taxes would actually be borne exclusively by “rich” households ($200,000+ for singles/$250,000+ for couples)…

Even the lowest income families (earning less than about $19,000 in 2012) will be on the hook for nearly $7,000 in ObamaCare taxes over the decade that started last year. [See the graph.]

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Let’s be clear. ObamaCare also absolutely and positively is socking it to the “rich” (approximately the top 2%). I calculate that families in that income range will end up paying $177,000 over the same decade. But the much more surprising figure is that such families will end up bearing only 34% of the ObamaCare tax burden. It’s true that the top 20% of families will bear about 56% of the overall burden, but such families also account for 50% of after-tax income (at least according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey data I used to make my calculations).

Feb 24, 2014 | 13 comments | by

Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen

loneliness-300x216Can loneliness increase your risk of death? Study: It’s almost as bad as being poor.

Bad news: 1/3 of those signing up for ObamaCare are age 55-64.

The Obama administration is thinking about extending the “risk corridors,” subjecting taxpayers to more risk.

Allied bombs killed at least 350,000 German civilians, 60,000 Italians, 53,000 French and 8,000 Dutch — not soldiers; civilians.

Feb 19, 2014 | 20 comments | by

Response to Uwe Reinhardt

Tax returnOur friend from Princeton surveys the commentary over the implicit marginal tax rate created as the ObamaCare tax subsidies in the exchanges are phased out and their impact on work. (See, for example, Casey Mulligan, who says the marginal tax rate under ObamaCare can go above 100% — meaning that when you earn one more dollar you lose more than a dollar.) Uwe then says that such a negative impact (however large) is inevitable.

Is it? Re-read Priceless, where we advocated a flat tax credit which is independent of income. Since it never phases out, it does not raise anyone’s marginal tax rate. Now, prior to ObamaCare one could argue that if everyone gets the same subsidy, the amount will be too low to make health insurance affordable for low-income families. But ObamaCare has changed everything.

Read More » »

Feb 17, 2014 | 16 comments | by

Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen

More131128072614-newday-dougherty-obamacare-deadline-00002001-story-top lawlessness: Mid-sized employers get another year’s delay.

Double lawlessness: large employers don’t have to offer coverage to more than 70 percent of their workers next year.

Gym memberships hit with ObamaCare tax.

Did you know that Uncle Sam is spending millions of dollars encouraging people to eat more pizza?

Feb 11, 2014 | 16 comments | by

Krugman Plays a Mulligan

The CBO now estimates that ObamaCare will reduce the labor supply by the equivalent of 2.4 million jobs by 2024. The main reason: the implicit marginal tax rates created by the withdrawal of the ObamaCare tax subsidies in the health insurance exchanges. Like unemployment insurance, food stamps and other welfare benefits, government help gets smaller as incomes rise and this is an implicit tax on labor.

-2052735002The CBO’s estimate is based on the work of University of Chicago labor economist Casey Mulligan, who estimates that the average marginal tax rate in the economy is 47% — meaning that workers get to keep a little more than half of what they earn. Mulligan says the real loss of labor due to ObamaCare will probably be twice what the CBO is reporting. He also estimates that about half of the excess unemployment we have been experiencing in recent years is due to the combined effect of all entitlement programs.

Enter Paul Krugman, who week after week, month after month, in his New York Times columns has been telling us that there is no evidence that entitlement spending reduces work effort. He responds to the CBO report by endorsing it. He explains:

[T]he incentive to work will be somewhat reduced by health insurance subsidies that fall as your income rises.

But he also says this is actually a good thing:

If you lose your job, you suffer immense personal and financial hardship. If, on the other hand, you choose to work less and spend more time with your family, “we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”

Read More » »

Feb 10, 2014 | 23 comments | by

Unions Disappointed in ObamaCare

Unions’ complaint

[T]he Affordable Care Act has subjected union health plans to new taxes and mandates while not allowing them to share in the subsidies that have gone to private insurance companies competing on the newly created exchanges. (Washington Post)

The administration’s foot dragging

Once we realized the [Affordable Care Act] would not let us keep the health care we had, we spent three years presenting the Administration with reasonable fixes to the ACA’s problems. All of them were rejected and the proposed regulations [regarding multi-employer health and welfare trust fund and other self-funded plans] offer virtually no assistance toward any of these solutions…

…If the Administration honestly thinks that these proposed rules are responsive to our concerns, they were not listening or they simply did not care. (WSJ)

Feb 07, 2014 | 16 comments | by

Young Workers are Better Off with Social Security Benefit Cuts…

…than they are with payroll tax increases. That’s the conclusion of a new National Center for Policy Analysis study:

social-security-pen-cropped-proto-custom_28Retaining the current benefit structure will require an immediate and permanent increase in the Social Security payroll tax of 3.3 percentage points. In contrast, a long-run balanced budget for Social Security could also be achieved by retaining the current tax rate, but making the following two benefit reforms.

  • Gradually raising the retirement age for workers who become eligible for benefits in 2023 and after.
  • Making the benefit formula less generous for higher earning workers through progressive price indexing.

What difference do these changes make?

  • With the baseline program, average-earning men born in 1985 will have to pay 13.5 percent of their lifetime income in taxes and receive benefits equal to 9.6 percent of their income.
  • However, the same workers in the reformed program would pay a lower tax rate of 10.2 percent to receive reformed benefits of 8.2 percent.
Feb 06, 2014 | 20 comments | by

Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen

New Jeshutterstock_26960899-630x286rsey taxes could eat up all of Peyton Manning’s Super Bowl earnings…

Krugman wrong again: there is no relationship between inequality and mortality.

Massachusetts is now home to the country’s worst performing exchange.

Peter Orszag: 63% of comparative effectiveness research money is going to things other than research. (Administrative costs?)

Jan 30, 2014 | 17 comments | by
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