Short-term customers boosting health costs - The Boston Globe

Short-term customers boosting health costs - The Boston Globe: "Thousands of consumers are gaming Massachusetts’ 2006 health insurance law by buying insurance when they need to cover pricey medical care, such as fertility treatments and knee surgery, and then swiftly dropping coverage, a practice that insurance executives say is driving up costs for other people and small businesses."

This is exactly what will be happening to health insurance companies on a national scale over the next year. Costs will skyrocket, those that opt to keep insurance rather than pay a fine and "game" the insurance law, as in Massachusetts, will find their premiums going up by 200-300%, while coverage plummets. Soon, all people with insurance will drop their coverage and pay the fine, then the insurance industry will collapse leaving us with the "Single Payer" system that the Democrats wanted all along.

Under the single payer system, costs will skyrocket with bureaucratic inefficiency and these costs will have to be paid for. The govt isn't going to produce any incentive for lowering costs, so they will increase taxes in the form of higher income taxes, penalties for non coverage and then the all hailed in Europe-Value Added Tax. The VAT in Europe and Canada is applied just like a national sales tax, with this little twist, the VAT adds a tax every time there is some value added to a product, raw ore made into steel-tax, steel cut into rods-tax, rods made into machine parts-tax, machine part added to machine-tax, machine sold to be installed in production line-tax. VAT adds up to approximately 15%, add this to state and local sales taxes and you will quickly be paying 25% of the cost of a new product in taxes.

Now add 50% of everything you earn going to various income taxes-federal, state, in many cases like NYC-Local, and FICA (since the FICA withholding is about to be increased as well) to 25% of your net going out to taxes when you spend and you really aren't left with much. (BTW, if you live in NYC and are in the highest tax bracket, your taxes are over 60% on income).

We are all officially financial slaves for the government. It's just going to take about 4 more years for them to slip the shackles on all of us, including those who thought they would not see a tax increase because Obama said so.