Well, one can't blame them for reading the president's lips while he was courting their votes:
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of U.S. voters favor putting a provision in the health care reform plan that would prohibit any new taxes, fees or penalties on families who make less than $250,000 a year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 22% of voters oppose such a provision. Nineteen percent (19%) are not sure.
Unfortunately, both Baucus and Obama favor a mandate to buy insurance, which is a middle-class tax hike. Take it away, Phil Klein:
Yet the idea of a mandate as a tax does not merely come from Stephanopoulos, or critics, or Merriam Webster, but from language in the current draft of the Baucus bill itself. In fact, on page 29, the Baucus proposal reads, "The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax....The excise tax would be assessed through the tax code and applied as an additional amount of Federal tax owed."
Just how much of one?
Under the Baucus plan, individuals would face a tax of at least $750 if they do not purchase health coverage. And while the proposal would provide subsidies to lower-income Americans, those subsidies would stop at 300 percent of the federal poverty level. What that means is that a family of four with a household income above $66,150 would face a tax of $3,800 if it does not obtain health insurance, while an individual with income above $32,490 would face a tax of $950. While the proposal would in fact waive the requirement for individuals who can prove they can't afford a minimal health insurance policy as defined by the government, to qualify for the exemption, premiums would have to exceed 10 percent of adjusted gross income -- or somewhere in the neighborhood of $3,000 for somebody with income of $32,490.
The White House makes the argument that the mandate would simply keep Americans with insurance from subsidizing Americans who show up in ERs, never to pay their bills, comparing it to car insurance mandates. This would make a lot more sense if the mandate Obama's pitching to stop the subsidies didn't require a bunch of subsidies to satisfy the mandate. (Also, car insurance mandates are state laws, do not carry federal tax penalties for failure to comply, and aren't all that effective, which makes the comparison dubious.) And, what happens if one doesn't pay the fine might not be a "tax hike" per se, but it's not likely to sit any better with middle-class voters pondering the mandate:
Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance. Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."
The tax increases Republicans point to include a proposed surcharge on households making over $350,000 a year, contained in a version of the bill in the House; reductions in the medical-cost tax deductions being considered by the Senate Finance Committee; and a tax on expensive health care plans under consideration in both chambers.
In case you don't remember Obama's fairly clear pronunciations on this subject during the campaign, you can still check in with his campaign web site's page on taxes, which has yet to be doctored to match his current vacillations. Click fast, before it reads, "Let us be perfectly clear, Obama has consistently said that mandates, fees, and penalties are necessary to pass the kind of robust health reform Americans deserve, and do not constitute tax hikes because Obama does not call them tax hikes, duh."