Congressional Budget Office: Under Obamacare 8 million Americans would get stuck paying higher taxes and still be without health insurance

Via Keith Hennessey:

These two examples show the difficulty of making an individual mandate work.  To get people to comply with the mandate, you have to impose a significant tax penalty on those who don’t comply.  This will change the calculation for many who were previously uninsured – they will buy health insurance, because the delta between the cost of having insurance and the tax penalty cost of not having it has shrunk, so they might as well buy it.

The bigger this gap, the fewer people will switch.  And for those who do not or cannot comply with the mandate, they end up in the worst of all worlds – uninsured and paying higher taxes.

From CBO’s new tables, it appears that about eight million U.S. citizens would fall into this category.  I expect that very few of these people would have more than $250,000 of income, the no-tax-increase line defined by the President.

I expect the House Democrats will emphasize that their bill would result in 97 percent of U.S. citizens having coverage.  Those other three percent, however, really get shafted, and that’s about eight million people.

Remember that promise that Obama the Candidate made that No Way, No How would he raise taxes on a single person who made less than $250K per year?

Yeah…well, he lied. He knew he was lying when he said it too. He was just counting on a lot of people being too stupid to know he was lying. He was right.