Overnight Healthcare: (Gruber) Calls for stiffer ObamaCare penalties

The Hill ^ | 10/26/16 | Sarah Ferris

[Libloather]

The panic over ObamaCare premiums is putting new focus on the individual mandate and how much people should pay when they don't obey it.

Under current law, the penalty for being uninsured is 2.5 percent of a person's taxable income or $695 -- whichever is greater.

Jonathan Gruber, a key ObamaCare adviser, declared Wednesday that he thinks that penalty needs to be greater. In an interview with CNN, Gruber pointed directly to the penalties when asked what part of the law he would change if he could go back.

"I think probably the most important thing experts would agree is we need a larger mandate penalty," Gruber said. "That's something I think, ideally, we would fix," he added.

The MIT economist is giving voice to a growing number of ObamaCare observers who say a more onerous penalty would help alleviate some of the law's struggles with attracting enough enrollees.

[stormhill]

Who else comes out of MIT? Ah, yes; Noam Chomsky.

They breed those over there

[ETL]

Obama, 2003...

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program”

“I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody.

And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out.

A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan.

And that’s what I’d like to see.

But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.

Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

Obama speaking to the Illinois AFL-CIO, June 30, 2003

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/june/barack_obama_on_sing.php
____________________________________

How Obamacare Actually Paves the Way Toward Single Payer

By Noam Scheiber
January 5, 2014

https://newrepublic.com/article/116105/obamacare-will-lead-single-payer-michael-moore

[DFG]

I am an Enrolled Agent

Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) = $100,000
Filing Status MFJ (married filing joint)
Health Care Responsibility Penalty is $1,985 for 2016

$100,000 - $12,600 (MFJ standard deduction) -
$8,000 (taxpayer + spouse exemption) = $79,400

$79,400 x 0.025 = $1,985

[ETL]

Obama's single-payer guru, Quentin Young

(he died in 2015)

Dr. Quentin Young, Longtime Obama Confidante and Physician to MLK [Martin Luther King]--source: Democracy Now

FROM "THE OBAMA FILE"...
RE: QUENTIN YOUNG

The primary figure who delivered Obama to the single-payer camp was Quentin Young, an 86-year-old retired physician who was a longtime friend and neighbor of Obama in Chicago.  Young joined the Young Communist League as a teenager in the late 1930s.  From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, he was closely associated with the Communist Party.  In October 1968 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was probing the extent of his knowledge about the riots that had erupted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago two months earlier.  The Committee accused Young of belonging to the Bethune Club, an organization for communist doctors; the group was named after Norman Bethune, a communist physician who devoted his services to the totalitarian regime of Mao Zedong

Dr. Young was active in the radical movements of the Sixties and Seventies and led a small delegation to Communist North Vietnam in 1972.  In the late 1970s, Young became associated with a Marxist organization known as the New American Movement, which was initially convened by Michael Lerner, an America-hating radical who counseled young people to explore the use of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs as portals to a greater comprehension of socialist principles.

In 1980 Young founded the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, a single-payer lobby group whose Board of Directors he chairs to this day.  In 1982 Young helped establish the Democratic Socialists of America, which, as the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, asserts that "many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed."  In 1987 Young co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a single-payer advocacy organization where he currently serves as national coordinator. In PNHP’s view, government-run healthcare "should be financed by truly progressive taxation."

In 1995 Young attended the now-famous meeting at the Hyde Park home of former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, where Barack Obama was first introduced to influential locals as the hand-picked successor to Alice Palmer, a pro-Soviet radical who planned to vacate her Illinois State Senate seat in pursuit of a higher elected office.  Young quickly became a friend and political ally of Obama, teaching the latter about the merits of single-payer healthcare. 

In a 2009 interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Young reminisced about the germination of his ideological kinship with the young Obama:

"Barack Obama, in those early days [as a state senator] -- influenced, I hope, by me and others -- categorically said single payer was the best way, and he would inaugurate it if he could get the support, meaning [Democratic] majorities in both houses, which he’s got, and the presidency, which he’s got.  And he said that on more than one occasion…."

Another noteworthy influence on Obama’s views vis à vis healthcare has been Dr. Peter Orris, who co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program with Quentin Young.  The son of a Communist Party member, Orris in the 1960s was a leader of Harvard University’s campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the New Leftist organization that aspired to overthrow America’s democratic institutions and remake the nation’s government in a Marxist image.  He later joined the Communist Party (CP) for more than two decades, before ultimately shifting his allegiance to the CP splinter group, Committees of Correspondence, where he remains a prominent figure to this day.

http://www.theobamafile.com/_associates/QuentinYoung.htm
_________________________________________________________

From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: Quentin Young

An admirer of Fidel Castro, Young is proud that two of his children traveled to Cuba as members of the Venceremos Brigades to cut sugar cane and pick oranges. (The Venceremos Brigades were organized by Castro's Cuban intelligence agency, which trained "brigadistas" in guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives.)

*Longtime supporter of communist causes
* Was active in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s
* Helped establish the Democratic Socialists of America
* Co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, an advocacy organization that lobbies on behalf of a single-payer, government-run healthcare system
* Friend and supporter of Barack Obama
* Longtime friend of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

Lots more at the link:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2439

[Evil Slayer]

So are we at the point where they round us up, load us in cattle cars and sent us to the extermination camps if we don’t pay up?

[grania]

Thanks to Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court the gov can tax what one doesn’t purchase. What happens if that tax on buying nothing is raised? More people will be forced into a horrible medical quagmire. And quality health care with people being able to control what options are chosen will be a privilege for the elite who can afford not to be involved.

[Sacajaweau]

My $100,000 was NET....I’m a mathematician...

[tomkat]

If Gruber were in the ground, perhaps the penalty would not neet to be increased

You took the gist of the thought right outta my head.

Was wondering if hanging that bastard would have a 'chilling effect' on those of his looter ilk.

[Rapscallion]

Absolutely right! People who refuse to comply should lose one month’s pay. Or be burned at the stake as several climate scientists recommend for us who refuse to believe in man-made global warming. /S

[libertarian27]

[existentially_kuffer]

"I think probably the most important thing experts would agree is we need a larger mandate penalty," Gruber said. "That's something I think, ideally, we would fix," he added. I think probably, the most important, experts, we need... something I think I'm convinced he's a fool!!

[HiTech RedNeck]

Something like this proverbially begs to be French revolutioned.

Being good, civil Americans we don’t want to use actual guillotines, but we would highly welcome the naming and shaming of those who brought us ill, remembering too that some of us were traveling in that direction too.

As the bible says, flog a mocker and the simple will learn wisdom.

[HiTech RedNeck]

MIT is an excellent place to learn computer engineering, electrical engineering, etc.

They really stepped in it with SOCIAL engineering. Their pin point brains are more a detriment than a help here.

[exDemMom]

Wasn't he the one who said Obama was only able to enact the ACA due to the stupidity of the American voter?

Obama completely ignored the will of the voter when he enacted Obamacare. The majority of voters were against it from the get-go, and actually had a pretty good idea of what Obamacare entailed.

I guess that the American voters are stupid because we would not support what we thought was a really bad idea.

[bert]

Perhaps at the present juncture where being civil has resulted in the loss of all that conservatives hold dear, off with their heads is not a bad thing.

The balance will not be restored unless there is massive action

[exDemMom]

So are we at the point where they round us up, load us in cattle cars and sent us to the extermination camps if we don’t pay up?

Only if Hillary is elected.

[Sirius Lee]

So it's back to being a mandate and penally, not a tax?

Roberts is pure scum.

[HiTech RedNeck]

The golden rule was never abolished with respect to how we treat fallen mankind.

The moment we assume we would never fall, we begin to fall.

[HiTech RedNeck]

It’s just another name for a taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaax!

[HiTech RedNeck]

And if “all that conservatives hold dear” is not capped by God, then frankly, it’s trash and there is not an objective reason to choose it over “all that liberals hold dear.”