You may recall the “marriage penalty,” a provision of the federal tax code that unjustly punished married couples with higher taxes than they would have paid as unmarried couples living together. Congress finally provided some relief from the marriage penalty during the administration of President George W. Bush.
But as The Wall Street Journal notes, the House and Senate bills to impose ObamaCare socialized medicine include their own marriage penalty, which would hit low- and middle-income Americans especially hard.
The newspaper gave this example of the penalty that would apply under the House bill: Suppose an unmarried man and woman living in the same household each earned $25,000 and bought medical insurance through the so-called “exchanges” that ObamaCare would set up. Each would pay roughly $1,500 a year in premiums for subsidized insurance through the exchanges, for a total of about $3,000.
But if the couple married, creating a combined income of $50,000, their total combined premium would jump to nearly $5,200 — a more than $2,000 annual increase — merely because they decided to marry, even though their other circumstances remained the same.
Under the Senate bill, the couple would pay about $1,700 extra.