The IRS can’t freeze your bank account or seize your assets if you haven’t been forced willing purchased health insurance. What they can do, what IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman says they will be doing, is holding tax refund checks.
He told reporters yesterday, in the wake of reports saying the health insurance mandate is rather innocuous, that enforcement is coming. The IRS always gets it’s man money.
Shulman said the IRS would not handcuff and lock up aggressively target anyone without health insurance coverage. How silly. Instead, the IRS would continue holding money they had been holding all year that isn’t rightfully theirs to hold until the owner of said held money purchases health insurance or pays a fine, which is how the IRS plans to keep collect some of that held money the mandate.
“These are not the kinds of things we send agents out about,” Shulman said.
That’s for businesses that owe four cents.
“These are things where you get a letter from us. Congress was very careful to make sure there was nothing too punitive in this bill.”
Nothing too punitive, meaning pay the mandate or face an escalating fine, a reported $325 in 2015 that more than doubles by the following year.
“The vast majority of American people have a healthy respect for the law and want to be compliant with their tax obligations,” Shulman said, mentioning letters, collection notices and offsets as among the various ways the IRS will reach out to people without coverage.
That’s why the entire nation goes into a parade and heady celebratory mood on April 15.
Schulman, who has gone under fire and criticism for not preparing his own taxes, is confident taxpayers will pay up, either the fine or the mandated health insurance purchase, in order to avoid the IRS holding tax refunds.
April 6th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Arent they going to end up yanking healthcare payments out of our checks anyway whether we like it or not ? Dont we have to start paying into this sht 4 years before were even able to access it ?
I’m confused. On you’re W2 form will there be an option offered to buy or not to but health insurance ?
April 6th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Sorry.
“offered to buy or not to but health insurance ?”
should say
offered to buy or not to “buy” health insurance ?
April 7th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
I’ll gladly pay the fine, or maybe I won’t have to since I intend to have no income other than what I take out of a bank savings account for 2014. My wife will be Medicare eligible then and perhaps, so will I even though I will only turn 60 that year. But rest assured, I will quit work before I support the legacy of Obamacare. I’ve got enough savings.
April 7th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Sol – if you turn 60 in 2014, then I suspect that you won’t be eligible for whatever care might be available then. They don’t want ‘old folks’ on the dole. That might prove to be expensive. They only want young healthy people that don’t require much health care. They’ll take our money but they don’t want to actually provide services.
April 9th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
I hope the next president that takes the oath in January 2013 is a conservative Republican that liquidates the IRS and replaces it with a flat tax, then obamacare will go bankrupt, then we’ll have a reason to do away with that too!
April 13th, 2010 at 8:34 am
The fine is still way too low to change the optimum strategy. Health insurance costs thousands of dollars a year, paying 695 bucks to wait until you need expensive health care to buy insurance is a great deal. Imagine if for a tenth of the price of car insurance you could buy the right to purchase car insurance right after you got in a wreck. In effect, the Democrats and Obama just gave Americans a new option: disaster insurance with 20-20 hindsight.
http://www.theinductive.com/blog/2010/3/30/mandate-loud-bark-and-nibble.html