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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPaul Krugman- Health Care Horror Hooey
Remember the death tax? The estate tax is quite literally a millionaires tax a tax that affects only a tiny minority of the population, and is mostly paid by a handful of very wealthy heirs. Nonetheless, right-wingers have successfully convinced many voters that the tax is a cruel burden on ordinary Americans that all across the nation small businesses and family farms are being broken up to pay crushing estate tax liabilities.
You might think that such heart-wrenching cases are actually quite rare, but youd be wrong: they arent rare; theyre nonexistent. In particular, nobody has ever come up with a real modern example of a family farm sold to meet estate taxes. The whole death tax campaign has rested on eliciting human sympathy for purely imaginary victims.
And now theyre trying a similar campaign against health reform.
Im not sure whether conservatives realize yet that their Plan A on health reform wait for Obamacares inevitable collapse, and reap the political rewards isnt working. But it isnt. Enrollments have recovered strongly from the laws disastrous start-up; in California, which had a working website from the beginning, enrollment has already exceeded first-year projections. The mix of people signed up so far is older than planners had hoped, but not enough so to cause big premium hikes, let alone the often-predicted death spiral.
And conservatives dont really have a Plan B in their world, nobody even dares mention the possibility that health reform might actually prove workable. Still, you can already see some on the right groping toward a new strategy, one that relies on highlighting examples of the terrible harm Obamacare does. Theres only one problem: they havent managed to come up with any real examples.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/opinion/krugman-health-care-horror-hooey.html?smid=re-share
Kber
(5,043 posts)Blue Cross Blue Shield canceled by husband's business's policy and the suggested replacement is much more expensive.
Which required him to shop around for another company.
Which took time and effort (probably up to 8 hours of his time comparing plan options).
In the end he found a comparable plan for about the same cost, so no harm no foul. I pointed out that he switched to BCBS 4 years ago in first place when Aetna pulled a similar stunt and tried to raise his premiums by 40%, so attributing this to ObamaCare is not an open and shut case, IMO.
You can put one more small business owner down in favor of single payer, but I don't think really small businesses like my husband's are really the demographic the GOP is targeting, no matter what they say.
(It's even too small to be affected negatively by the "death tax". )
Stallion
(6,476 posts)The horrors of the dreaded "Death Tax" is the biggest fraud ever pulled on the average, uniformed citizens of the United States. A Husband and Wife through proper planning should currently be able to avoid the "Death Tax" if their estates are under about 10 million dollars. But Americans hate the Death Tax like they were landed gentry from Downton Abbey. In the meantime, wealth accumulates to Trust Fund generation after Trust Fund generation