Jan 1, 2008 - Corp-Care Cranks Up the Pressure

The headlines are awash with Corp-Care's increasingly hostile determination to force Bay-Staters into 'health' insurance plans, but note the vagueness in the passages excerpted from the Sunday Republican via MassLive.com:

The state's new health-care law requires all residents 18 and older to have health insurance on Jan. 1 if it is affordable to them. If people violate this law, they could lose their personal exemptions when they file income taxes this year, a penalty that amounts to about $219 for a single filer, said a spokesman for the state Department of Revenue.

New tax forms contain work sheets and tables to help people determine the health insurance premiums they should be able to afford. People will not be fined if there is no affordable plan available to them.

Taxpayers without affordable health insurance can maintain their personal exemptions through an appeals process. Taxpayers would need to claim that a hardship in 2007 prevented them from purchasing health insurance and they may need to defend themselves at a hearing by a state agency.

Who's doing the deciding as to how affordable something is for us lemmings corralled into this pen of corporate welfare? And those new tax forms? Known as the 1099-HC, it spans 3 pages. Be a refusenik, and you'll have to wade through it in its entirety. This, along with the barely mentioned appeals process means you can bet your ass your life will become a lot more complicated - and expensive.

Additionally, 'hardship' is defined in drastic terms: homelessness, having utilities shut off, being hounded by collection agencies or bankruptcy; all those things that would indicate you have not enough recoverable assets for the greedy-ass system to come after. Which leads us to the bottom line of what this dubiously monikered 'reform' is REALLY about: MILKING THE WORKING CLASS.

As of this posting, some figures are making it into print: up to (yeah, right!) $ 1824 for the year for a couple without 'health' insurance. That privilege falls to our hypothetical couple lucky enough to be pullin' down such a sizable fortune as $ 41,076 per year.

A Boston.com check yields a page full of articles:
http://search.boston.com/local/Search.do?s.sm.query=penalties+for+uninsured&s.tab=

For specificity on the quirky fine structure, the following article is instructive:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/12/31/penalties_for_not_obtaining_health_care_in_2008?mode=PF

Nagging questions remain. For just one little example, why is a 'couple' - when filing jointly as a 'couple' - then treated as two separate individuals for the purpose of assessing their participation - or fine for not participating in, Corp-Care? I'd say there's some explaining to do.

Moreover, no matter who the refusenik is, she/he will still lack 'health' insurance while paying these something-for-nothing fines to Corp-Care!

None of us are fooled. Corp-Care, Profit-Care - whatever you want to call it - now has a legal cudgel to harass us into participation in its extraction game. NO amount of money will ever satisfy the Medical/Industrial Complex. 'ENOUGH' isn't a word in their vocabulary!
Happy New Year? Better guess again - if you're on the radar screen of Bay State Corp-Care.