With the current state of the economy, receiving health care coverage has become an obstacle for most Americans.
Nearly 25 million people do not have health insurance, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a recent interview on Fox News.
This percentage is high, he said, mainly because of joblessness. California’s unemployment rate is 12.5 percent, according to the Employment Development Department (EDD).
With the high unemployment rate, many of those who are unemployed may not be able to afford the soon-to-be mandatory health care coverage.
The passing of the health care reform bill means that health care will become available and at an affordable cost, according to The L.A. Times.
This bill will prevent insurance companies from denying coverage by age, gender and any other number of factors ,according to The L.A. Times.
The bill, which passed 219-212 without a single Republican vote, according to L.A. Times, would make a nearly $1 trillion contribution in taxpayer money over the next decade to help an estimated 32 million Americans without health care coverage.
And the 85 percent of the people who have health insurance today will see their premiums go up, Grassley said.
The L.A. Times reports that many Republicans believe the overhaul will drive the nation deeper into debt at a time when the U.S. is still struggling to recover from the recession.
If a person decides that he does not want to buy the mandated insurance that the federal government says every individual has to buy, then he or she would incur a $1,500 fine to be paid to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which is not really an income tax, but a tax for not having insurance, Grassley said.
This means that due to the “Affordable Health Choices Act” those who do not get health insurance will be fined for up to $1,000 for not applying, according to neithercorpforum.com.
Essentially, the government is proposing a tax on living, or rather, on the failure to provide the necessary means for one to assure that they are healthy.
“Proponents of the bill claim there will be subsidies for low income families, but here another problem arises in the fact that Dodd and others who support the bill have yet to explain how they plan to fund this little adventure into collectivist medicine,” neithercorpforum.com said.
The details of the bill and how they will utilize its budget have not been revealed, according to neithercorpforum.com.
However, the Government Budget Office does make the observation that the fines derived from the bill could raise up to $36 billion over 10 years time.
The health care reform bill may provide health care for many Americans, but in the long run it will prove costly, especially for those who can’t afford it.
