Obamacare: What Does It Do For The Poor?

I’m sure you’ve all heard about this thing called the Affordable Care Act, and if you’re one of the 37% of Americans who don’t know it’s also known as Obamacare.  Now if you’ve been here for a while you know that I’m pretty critical of Republicans, and also of Democrats, and of Independents, and Gr—okay, y’know what I’m just pretty critical of anyone in office, running for office, or voting.

Now during the presidential election I wasn’t too keen on Mitt Romney, because I think there are few things worse than a Republican president.

Unfortunately one of those few things worse than a Rep. president, is a Democrat president.  Here’s my philosophy:

I am in the poorer multitudes of the nation.  I was born poor, I was raised poor, I am still somewhat poor, I support minority and female equality, and I’m not particularly religious.  Republicans come right out and tell you that they hate the poor and non-religious, and especially minorities and women.  Everything they say and do suggests that.

Democrats come out and say that they love the poor, non-religious, women, and minorities…and they jump right in line with the republicans to favor giant, fanatical-Christian, corporations and organizations.  When a Democratic president appoints a Spiritual Adviser, you know you voted for the wrong person.

Anyway before I start a riot let me to get to my point: Obamacare.

Obamacare sucks.  I don’t have health insurance and in the past 5 years I have only been to the doctor once, and it was Emergency Care.

So let’s look at and compare getting insurance versus not getting insurance.

When I wound up in the emergency room, the prices were ridiculous: $230 just to talk to the doctor and another $430 just to be taken to a back room and have a nurse check my pulse.  So that’s $660, total.

So I’ll admit, in 5 years’ time, I’m $660 in the hole to start.

So now let’s look at what an Obamacare plan would get me…

If I get a Bronze plan which pays for about 60% it would cost me roughly $119.19 a month, that equates to $1430.28 a year.

So in 5 years’ time that would equal…$7151.40 that I would have paid for insurance coverage.  And before you talk about the premium subsidy, my state doesn’t cover my income level for the subsidy, so I have to pay 100% of the premium (trust me, I’ve checked).

But, on the positive side, my $660 hospital bill would have only been about $264.

So in 5 years’ time I would have only spent $7415.40 in medical costs.

Whereas in real life I only spent $660 in 5 years’ time.

However, the Obamacare law makes it required to have insurance.  If you don’t, you have to pay a penalty, based on your income.  My particular penalty would be, as of 2016…$650 a year.  That winds up being $3250 in 5 years’ time, but I’d have to pay 100% of my medical expenditures.

So without insurance, under Obamacare, I pay $3910 in the same 5 years’ time.

Before Law: $660

With Insurance: $7,415.40

Without Insurance: $3,910.00

Cost Difference: $3,505.40 more with insurance

Now the argument I always hear is, “What if you get hurt really bad or really sick?”

What’s it matter?  If I get hurt at work, workman’s compensation covers it.  If I get hurt in a business, their liability insurance covers it.  If I get hurt in the car, my car insurance will cover it.  If I fall off a ladder replacing a light bulb, I have medical liability coverage on my homeowner’s insurance.

Basically as long as I don’t get hit by a meteorite while jaywalking in another borough, there’s something out there that covers my injured ass in case of an accident.

Now illness is a real issue, that’s what took me to the ER a few years ago.  I had a throat infection (Strep Throat) and it caused my esophagus to swell shut, I began to asphyxiate and had to get antibiotics and steroids to keep from blacking out (and eventually dying).

There’s cancer, strep, hep, food poisoning, malaria, bronchitis, all kinds of things that can go wrong.  So let’s go for gold…I get cancer and it costs me $50,000 in treatment.

Well guess what?  My Bronze plan only covers 60% of that, so I still have to pay $20,000 out of pocket, not to mention the $7,415.40 for the premiums.

That’s a total of $27,415.40 for 5 years of cancer treatments.

After taxes, that equates to 186% of my yearly income.  So that means, if I saved 1% of my post-tax income every year…it would take me 138 years to pay that off, and that’s assuming they aren’t going to charge me interest or up my premiums for having cancer.  Remember, Obamacare says that an insurance company can’t refuse me for having a pre-existing condition, but it doesn’t say they can’t charge me higher premiums for having cancer.

So if I don’t have insurance, there’s a chance I’ll wind up broke and penniless.  But if I get the insurance, I’m guaranteed to wind up broke and penniless.  And now Obama’s stupid law has weighed things down to make sure I wind up broke and penniless a little sooner.

All the Affordable Care Act does is help insurance companies.  If the government is going to require a free citizen to own or have something, then it should be paid for by the government.

You can reason the legal requirement for car insurance because owning a car is not necessary to life.  If you don’t want to pay car insurance, don’t drive a car.  If you don’t want to pay homeowner’s insurance, then rent.  If you don’t want to pay health insurance…uhh, then die, I guess?

If health insurance is required, then it should be free; regardless of income.  I don’t care if you make ten grand a year or ten million a year, you should be able to walk into a hospital and receive free medical care in a timely and efficient manner.  I’d rather just pay an extra 2.5% of my yearly income in taxes and be able to see any doctor, any time, for any reason.

Republicans call Obamacare the worst thing to happen to America since the birth of the Democratic party; Democrats call it a stepping stone to a better system.  But in truth it’s somewhere in the middle: It’s certainly not what we need and it’s actually moving in the wrong direction.

~RCS

We CAN Erase The Debt, Easily

You all know that I hate quoting myself, right?  Well I touched on a subject in my last post, but didn’t go really into depth with it.  Now I’m going into a deeper hole to mine some more information.  Follow along with me as I configure these numbers and come to the conclusion that…the nation is bought and owned by the wealthiest members of the nation.  And that there aren’t many ways to change it.

Here’s where the thought started in the last post to recap:

“And look at Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, who makes about $20,000 every 8 hours.  That’s equivalent to making $2,500 an hour if he worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; that’s a grand total of $21.9 million a year in income.  He pays a little less than $3.3 million a year in taxes.  If he paid the same 22% that I do on my hard-earned money, that’d be a little more than $4.8 million.

And both Romney and my million-dollar CD only pay 15% taxes, whereas I pay closer 22% tax on the money I bust my ass for.  In other words, he pays a little less than $3.3 million a year in taxes.  If he paid the same 22% that I do on my hard-earned money, that’d be a little more than $4.8 million.  Whereas I pay a little more than $4,600 in taxes, but if I only paid 15% in taxes, I’d pay a little more than $3,100.”

Now if we follow along with those numbers…

And if we assume that all the .1% top income earners earn Romney’s amount and pay his level of taxes and that the lower 50% of the nation that make less than $26,000 a year all make the cut-off of 26k and pay my effective tax rate of 22% than we can look at the following results.

Top .1% Population: 300,000 people

Top .1% Income Gross: $6,570,000,000,000 (that is 6.57 trillion dollars)

Top .1% Tax Payment (at 15%): $985,500,000,000 (that is 985.5 billion dollars)

Bottom 50% Population: 150,000,000 people (that is 150 million)

Bottom 50% Income Gross: $3,900,000,000,000 (that is only 3.9 trillion dollars)

Bottom 50% Tax Payment (at 22%): $858,000,000,000 (yup, 858 billion dollars)

 

Now if we switch those tax rates around we find these numbers…

Top .1% Tax Payment (at 22%): $1,445,400,000,000 (a mighty 1.4 trillion dollars)

Bottom 50% Tax Payment (at 15%): $585,000,000,000 (still a comely 585 billion dollars)

So if we just switch the tax rates, we wind up with the top .1% paying 459.9 billion dollars a year more in taxes and the bottom 50% pays 127.5 billion dollars a year less.

In total that is an increase in $332.4 billion in taxes for the government.  In a period of 4 years we would increase tax revenue by more than $1.3 trillion dollars.

So if we can cut spending by 1.5 trillion dollars a year, that’d cut the budget deficit by 100 Billion dollars (i.e. .1 trillion dollars) a year, so after 4 years we would lower the national debt by 1.7 trillion dollars in 4 years just by making respectable cuts to the wasteful government spending and forcing 300 thousand people to pay the same tax rate as 150 million people who, combined, make less than the aforementioned 300 thousand people.

 

Now before you rant and rave at those numbers…keep in mind that we’re only looking at .1% against 50%.  If we look at Mitt Romney’s cronies among the top full 1% and realize that they must make around similar amounts as him.  So if we assume that the remainder of the top 1%, the other .9%, make marginally less than him we can create an even fancier number.

We’ll calculate it like this: We’ll assume that the top 1% makes, as a combined average, 20% less than Romney’s income per person.  That gives us the following numbers…

Top 1% Population: 3,000,000 (million) people

Top 1% Income Gross: $52,560,000,000,000 (that would be 52.6 trillion dollars a year)

Top 1% Tax Payment (at 22%): 7,884,000,000,000 (7.9 trillion dollars a year in taxes)

Top 1% Tax Payment (at 22%): $11,563,200,000,000 (yes…11.6 trillion dollars a year in tax income)

So if we raise effective taxes from 15% to 22% on the top 10%, using our numbers, we raise tax income (after accounting for lowering taxes on the bottom 50% from 22% to 15% tax) by $3,551,700,000,000.  In other words: 3.6 trillion dollars a year.

After 4 years, we’d have 14.4 trillion dollars a year, even without the spending cuts.  If we manage to cut spending by $1.5 trillion a year, we’d end up with $14.8 trillion dollars more than we get every year, now, in four years’ time.

So in the term of one single president, we could pay down over 97% of the national debt.  In the same president’s second term, we would erase the national debt in the first few months of his (or her) second term and by the end of the second term we would have a national surplus of 14.3 trillion dollars.

So in 8 years’ time we would not only erase the debt, but acquire a surplus almost equivalent to the debt as of writing this post ($15.2 trillion).

Now explain to me why we can’t have universal free health care and have this huge deficit, again?

~RCS

Erin Burnett: Millionaire Surcharge(s)?

Here’s a little bit of a quickie to make up for all those missing updates a week ago.

Watching Erin Burnett on CNN yesterday, she was talking about a congressional plan to fund the payroll tax deductions with a millionaire surcharge.  I.e. anyone who makes over 1 million dollars will pay a flat-rate tax on every dollar they make after they hit the 1 million mark.

Generally each plan who suggests this is a 1 or 2 cent surcharge, per dollar.  So that means that if you make 4 million dollars a year you pay the regular tax rates on your first million, then you pay an additional 1 cent per dollar on everything else.  So of the remaining three million, you’d end up paying an extra $30,000 with this surcharge.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m making 4 million a year, I’d be willing to pay an extra 30 grand, myself; if it meant that social services in the country I live in will cease to function if I don’t.

What brings this all up is Ms. Burnett’s comment on the plan.  She said (not verbatim, but as close as I can recall), “I hear this millionaire surcharge plan come up a lot.  Now if everyone who suggested it got their way, there’d be like…20 surcharges on millionaires.”
She’s right; but you know what?  I’m okay with that.  If we assume that each surcharge is for the greater amount of 2 cents per dollar that means that each dollar a multi-millionaire income maker brings in would get a 40 cent surcharge.  So using our example, they’d end up paying $1,200,000 in surcharges.  It’s basically a 40% tax, admittedly on top of the 15% tax they’re already paying for a total of 55% effective tax rate.

And quite frankly, if you have a personal income of 4 million dollars…I don’t really mind you paying that much in taxes, to be totally honest.

Living Off a Million Dollars

I talk off and on about the capability to live off a million dollars, which a lot of people tell me I am wrong about.  I like to respond that…I am not.  Without delving too deeply into my income I make between 20-25 thousand dollars a year, myself; depending on how much overtime I work.

Now if I switched to only working two days a week at my current job and rate, I would make about $8,000 a year.

So let’s look at what would happen if I went from working 40+ hours a week to working 16 hours a week, but had a million dollars in the bank.

I could place my million dollars into a 5-year CD (Certificate of Deposit) with my credit union which would bring an interest rate of 1.88% interest per year (the last time I bought a CD it had 3.30% interest; damn economy).  I could live off the dividends, which would equal out to $18,963.  So a million dollars only pays a thousand dollars or so less than I make working 5 days a week, every week, with no time off: Working 2,080 hours a year.

Keep in mind that million dollars’ interest would be $18,963 for 0 hours of work a year.  If I work 2 days a week and take no additional time off, that’s only 832 hours a year of work and I’d make a grand total of $26,963.

Amazing what a million dollars can do for you in a 5-year rolling CD.

Elin Nordegren, whom I recently spoke of buying a $12 million mansion and razing it, got $100 million from her divorce settlement.  So let’s take a look at what kind of money you could make, doing 0 hours of income-bearing work, and putting the entire $100 million in the same 5-year rolling CD I was just speaking of.

You’d make…$1.9 million a year in interest.  That’s right.  And you’d pay a lower tax rate on it than you did if you actually earned that money.

Let’s say that Nordegren builds an $18 million mansion where the $12 million one stood.  That will leave her with $70 million to put in the bank.  She would make…$1.3 million a year in interest.

And look at Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney, who makes about $20,000 every 8 hours.  That’s equivalent to making $2,500 an hour if he worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; that’s a grand total of $21.9 million a year in income.

And both Romney and my million-dollar CD only pay 15% taxes, whereas I pay closer 22% tax on the money I bust my ass for.  In other words, he pays a little less than $3.3 million a year in taxes.  If he paid the same 22% that I do on my hard-earned money, that’d be a little more than $4.8 million.  Whereas I pay a little more than $4,600 in taxes, but if I only paid 15% in taxes, I’d pay a little more than $3,100.

I’d love to have a million dollars or so, I’d never have to work again in my life if I didn’t want to.  Warren Buffett might be issuing challenges about donating money to the government in taxes; but I’ll challenge any wealthy person to disprove me by giving me a million dollars to try my theory out with.

If I can’t live as comfortably as I am now with just the interest from the million dollars they pony up, I’ll give the million dollars back.  If an independent source can vouch that my quality of life is on-par, or better, with me living just off the interest dividends then I get to keep the million.

I guarantee not a single millionaire/billionaire will take up my offer.

~RCS