Did You Know About The Belly Button Tax?

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal posted an article about the debate over the Belly-Button Tax in Obamacare. Yes, you read that right. There is a tax on every person covered by an insurance plan–policy holder, spouses, and children. This has become known as the belly-button tax.

The article reports:

It’s paid by every company that provides insurance — big businesses, organized labor, and insurance carriers. The likely beneficiaries of the compensation fund, though, are just the traditional insurance carriers, who will become required to sell coverage to everyone, regardless of their medical history.

Large employers and unions have fought hard to get an exemption, saying the levy is unfair because they don’t directly benefit from the fund. Insurers say it’s an important fee they need to keep.

If you are going to require insurance companies to insure everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions, you need to find a way to keep them from going bankrupt. We need to remember that companies are in businesses to make money. If they are not able to make money, why should they stay in business? The International Economic Development website reports that the profit margins for health insurance companies is about 3 percent. They rank about 88 among 215 industries as far as profit margins go. That profit margin is not overly large–these companies don’t have a lot of wiggle room to accommodate the federal government seriously impacting their profits. I don’t support ObamaCare, but if you are going to have ObamaCare, you need a belly-button tax.

ObamaCare does not make sense economically or otherwise. It will eventually collapse under its own weight. We just need to make sure it collapses before it totally destroys healthcare in America.

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