Pelosi Bill: Buy Insurance Or Go To Jail!
More change we can believe in. Not only does the House bill manadate that you buy insurance, but it also includes provisions for civil and criminal penalties - including up to 5 years imprisonment - for refusing to do so.
PELOSI: Buy a $15,000 Policy or Go to JailJCT Confirms Failure to Comply with Democrats’ Mandate Can Lead to 5 Years in JailFriday, November 06, 2009
Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.
In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”
Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:
“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]- – - – - – - – - -
“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2]- – - – - – - – - -
“Criminal penalties
Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:
• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.
• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]
When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.
“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.
Can you say, ‘fascism?’
November 6th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
That’s what the “hardship exemption” and “affordability credits” are for.
Only the wealthy, who can easily afford health care, will be subject to criminal penalty when they fail to pay the applicable tax. They would be charged with a form of tax evasion. Which already carries criminal penalties.
The federal government will provide affordability credits, available on a sliding scale for low and middle-income individuals and families, to make premiums affordable.
“Willful tax evasion”. You copy and paste it on your own blog and you don’t even understand it?
My advice is that you suck in that sow belly of yours, go to college and get some reading comprehension, and learn to live with universal health care.
Yankee moron.
November 7th, 2009 at 1:22 am
Typical.
Let me try to spoonfeed this to you, my small-minded liberal friend. The government has no right to take over our health care industry. It is – get this now – unconstitutional. By the same token, our government has no right to force us to buy anything, including health insurance. That also is – pay attention again now – unconstitutional.
The issue isn’t about tax evasion. The issue is we are losing our liberty – thanks, of course, to fools like you who are all too willing to throw it away.
By the way, it is quite ironic that the so-called champions of *equality* think it’s OK to apply the law differently to some Americans merely because they are rich. Yes, throw those rich folks in jail! ‘Equal protections,’ as it were, only applies apparently when it can be used to ram their agenda down our throats.
November 7th, 2009 at 7:49 am
You are exactly right about the health care proposal being an encroachment on our liberty. You are also right to invoke the spectre of fascism. Fascism occurs when the government takes over and controls all private activity while leaving title to property nominally private. In other words, doctors are not state employees under fascism, but every aspect of their practice is controlled and supervised by the government. That describes precisely what the goal of all of the health care reform proposals on the Hill today.
As to the buffoon who commented in #1, maybe now you see why I always point out that Leftists point guns at everyone and anyone who disagrees with them. They have no idea what it means to peacefully persuade people to follow their course of action – they only know how to use brute force to bash your teeth in if you disagree with them. That is why their rallies always turn violent – because for them, it is all about using force against peaceful people. They have no clue – and no intention of leaving peaceful people alone. Their advocacy of the rule of brute force is another pillar of their fascist paradise.
With regard to your insightful comment about how the Left pretends to champion equality but applies that principle in the most discriminatory manner, I want to give you a lengthy quote from an article by Ayn Rand that connects your point with the Left’s advocacy of fascism. The quote is from her article, America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business, published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Her use of the word “businessmen” can be interchanged with the word “rich” by the liberal fascist in #1 above:
If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased—would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty—would you call that persecution?
If your answer is “yes”—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessmen.
The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the “liberal” intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.
Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen. For instance, consider the evil of condemning some men and absolving others, without a hearing, regardless of the facts. Today’s “liberals” consider a businessman guilty in any conflict with a labor union, regardless of the facts or issues involved, and boast that they will not cross a picket line “right or wrong.” Consider the evil of judging people by a double standard and of denying to some the rights granted to others. Today’s “liberals” recognize the workers’ (the majority’s) right to their livelihood (their wages), but deny the businessmen’s (the minority’s) right to their livelihood (their profits). If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as “social gains”; if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as “selfish greed.” If the workers’ standard of living is low, the “liberals” blame it on the businessmen; but if the businessmen attempt to improve their economic efficacy, to expand their markets, and to enlarge the financial returns of their enterprises, thus making higher wages and lower prices possible, the same “liberals” denounce it as “commercialism.” If a non-commercial foundation—i.e., a group which did not have to earn its funds—sponsors a television show, advocating its particular views, the “liberals” hail it as “enlightenment,” “education,” “an,” and “public service”; if a businessman sponsors a television show and wants it to reflect h/s views, the “liberals” scream, calling it “censorship,” “pressure,” and “dictatorial rule.” When three locals of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters deprived New York City of its milk supply for fifteen days—no moral indignation or condemnation was heard from the “liberal” quarters; but just imagine what would happen if businessmen stopped that milk supply for one hour—and how swiftly they would be struck down by that legalized lynching or pogrom known as “trust-busting.”
Whenever, in any era, culture, or society, you encounter the phenomenon of prejudice, injustice, persecution, and blind, unreasoning hatred directed at some minority group—look for the gang that has something to gain from that persecution, look for those who have a vested interest in the destruction of these particular sacrificial victims. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known. Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
America has not yet reached the stage of a dictatorship. But, paving the way to it, for many decades past, the businessmen have served as the scapegoat for statist movements of all kinds: communist, fascist, or welfare. For whose sins and evils did the businessmen take the blame? For the sins and evils of the bureaucrats.
A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
Amazingly, this article was written in 1962! But it is just as applicable to today’s world.