Sorry I’ve been off line for a few weeks. Work schedule has been brutal. I wanted to weigh in on the Health care bill that appears to be wending its way through Congress. There are many things to cause suspicion. As Ruth Marcus pointed out in her column in today’s Washington Post, there are some problems with the assumptions in the CBO report. I would commend her column to you, if I could only figure out how to imed links in this blog. There are some troubling provisions that every American should think about. (1) Individually mandated coverage. This means that if your very healthy 20 something wants to spend his or her money on WII’s, partying, and food, they now have to pay for the privilege of not having health insurance. $750 per year. (2) For those who have adult children living at home, this is yet another delay in the quest for the empty nest. The Employer mandate for insurance. This is also a problem waiting to happen. Let’s say you came to America, got your green card and started your own lawn maintenance business. You hire people who speak your language and who may or may not have documents. You hire them as independent contractors and pay them in cash. You find them hanging out at certain street corners in town looking for work and you pay them above or below the minimum wage. Over the year the number of various contractors exceeds 50. A couple of years later the IRS audits you and asks you to prove that these were not statutory employees. The IRS doesn’t accept your explanation and slaps you with a $40,000 tax penalty for 20 uninsured employees exceeding 30 (the agent tells you he’s being kind). The penalty grows to $80,000 since its for 2 years and then interest gets added. To make matters worse, you also get slapped with social security and medicare taxes not withheld on their $100,000 of wages, another $15,000. Suddenly you’re looking at a $100,000 tax bill and you think about going out of business when the IRS publishes a lien against your business. Then it gets worse, one of these “contractors” gets drunk and falls off a curb and was hospitalized needing brain surgery to save his life. The hospital finds out somehow that he was your “employee” and you didn’t provide him insurance. So, the hospital sues you for his medical bills $400,000. So the total is now $500,000 of liability for being an employer who paid $100,000 in wages to what you thought were independent contractors. Talk about a perverse way to deal with the immigration issue by putting all these guys into bankruptcy. So, the business goes bankrupt and the Government and the hospital don’t get paid and the owner has $15,000 tax liability for the FICA and medicare taxes. The Government never sees the other $80,000 in taxes which of course went into the calculation used by the CBO to make this bill look rational.