Cooper: When you say no to Obamacare

People voice their support for the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 2012, as it considered the legality of the law's individual mandate.
People voice their support for the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 2012, as it considered the legality of the law's individual mandate.

As the annual Nov. 1 Obamacare enrollment date approaches, the burgeoning fines for those who choose not to sign up should remind us anew what a blow to freedom the Affordable Care Act was and continues to be.

According to the law, everyone either must have health insurance or pay a fine.

Those fines began as $95 or 1 percent of taxable income (whichever is greater!) in 2014 but will increase to $695 or 2.5 percent of taxable income in 2016.

It was common - though, depending on circumstances, unwise - for healthy young people to forgo health insurance when they were single and early in their careers to save money. A year's worth of saved health insurance premiums would make for a nice little nest egg.

That's not possible anymore. Indeed, the Obamacare administration and the insurance industry now count on those healthy young people. The idea, of course, is that healthy young people will have few claims, so the majority of the money they pay in either premiums or fines will help offset the costs of those on the other end of the scale - older people with more claims.

This particular aspect of the law - the individual mandate- is the one the United States Supreme Court should have overturned in 2012, but Chief Justice John Roberts decided in a sleight-of-hand gesture that - presto, change-o! - the individual mandate was a tax - despite President Obama previous protestations to the contrary - and therefore legal.

That's why your employer today forces you to indicate whether you have insurance. That status must be reported to the federal government, which will then deduct your fine if you do not have health insurance from your income tax refund, if you receive one.

Those fines totaled $1.5 billion for the 2014 tax year, an average of about $200 apiece for roughly 7.5 million households.

Apparently, the administration needs every penny. It admitted last week its 2016 enrollment is likely to be less than half of what its Congressional Budget Office predicted in March. Indeed, only one in seven people who are eligible for coverage is expected to sign up, in spite of the doubled fines. In the future, that will mean higher premiums for those with insurance, for those on private plans and those who are enrolled in Obamacare.

Let's be clear. Purchasing health insurance is usually a wise decision, but what has happened with the Affordable Care Act affirms such a choice should be a personal decision and not something mandated by the government.

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