To the editor:
Obama care in 2014 will hit everybody in the pocketbook because of a bevy of new taxes and fees on health insurance premiums, income-tax bills and user fees written into the bill that the Democrats passed without reading it so they could find out what’s in it. How dumb is that?
Let’s take a look at some of these costs that the insurance companies and health providers got along without  just fine while providing meaningful service before Obama care became the law of the land. Insurers are now required to add a 3.5 percent users’ fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov Web site. Guess who pays for that? Then there’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, whatever that is.
There’s also a 2 percent levy on every heath plan which just puts more money into the government’s pockets, you know the same pockets that kept your Social Security funds that seem to have disappeared. And of course there are those little ugly non-premium related hidden taxes, such as the 2.3 percent medical-device tax that will inflate the cost of items such as pacemakers, stents and prosthetic limbs.
And if what’s happening to taxpayer expenses isn’t enough of a kick in the wallet, the government has seen fit to further punish Americans who are currently allowed to deduct high out-of-pocket medical expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of their annual income expenses by raising the threshold to 10 percent giving them smaller income-tax deductions. Now was that really necessary?
One insurance company has seen fit to include these Obama Care taxes and fees as a separate line on the premium bill, which nets out to add 7 percent to the cost for health insurance. I guess the insurance company wanted to point the finger at Obama so they wouldn’t get so much direct flak from policy holders.
It seems to me we don’t need all these new taxes or even Obama Care. Yes we do need improvements to health care   but let’s do it in a meaningful way with improvements to what we have today, not a dismantling of the best health care system in the world.
I believe that if the folks get together and demand Congress scrap Obama Care and start over, we can salvage the disaster we’re facing. If the folks can rise up against those TV progressives and reverse the attack on religion as was recently done with Duck Dynasty, why can’t it be done to Obama Care?
– Karl Kachadoorian, Tryon