If obama care goes into effect this company and employees will have to pay 40% tax on what our health care program is worth. (Value)
The only tax that's 40% is an excise tax that is it's only taxed if you have a so-called "cadillac" health insurance plan. In order to hit this 40% tax you have to break the threshold of $10,200 per year for individual or $27,500 for a family plan. These thresholds were even raised higher because unions lobbied to try and get their jobs not affected by it, and their jobs normally have very good plans. Most high risk jobs don't even hit this sort of payout, too. Your company would have to be paying out almost 8 or 9 times more than what you already put in. And that is pretty much double the average cost of health care for a family plan ($13,375 in 2009)
Next, the 40% isn't a tax on the entire sum. It's only a tax of what is in excess of this. If your plan is worth $30,000 per year, for instance, they would only be taxed at 40% of $2500, or a total of $1000.
Last, that 40% tax doesn't even take effect until 2018.
The company will most likely drop health care and pay the penalty as penalty is much lower than the tax amount.
If they do drop it it's not because of the tax amount being lower. Right now they don't have to insure you. The cost for not insuring you vs insuring you is already lower. If they do drop you they're just using the tax as a silly excuse. It would also not make much sense, because if you are getting a "cadillac" plan (high enough to hit the threshold for the tax), then they'd effectively be lowering your salary by half. They'd hemorrhage employees pretty quickly. And aside from that companies across the board have slowly been dropping employees because of rising health care costs, anyway. If they are going to drop they would likely do it anyway, reform or not. In the surveys I've found that say some employers would drop, they also found the employers would increase pay. And they'd have to, because, again, this would be like effectively dropping your salary.
That would meqn I have to get into government plan w/deductible at a set % rate of my income. Approx $4500 per year.
There isn't a government plan. The public option was, regrettably (in my opinion), dropped. If you get dropped by your company, you have to buy into an exchange that won't be set up until 2014. No one really knows the rates on that yet, and they won't be based on a % of your income. They'll likely be similar (if not lower) than what you get for private insurance currently (which as I've seen is lower than your $4,500 estimate), because the policies sold in the exchanges will be regulated for compliance with minimum standards, and the premiums will be subject to oversight.
Mom owning a business will have to pay the government a set rate for health care based on her income-as business
Mom's business is completely exempt from any sort of business mandates, since she is self-employed. You can employ even as much as 50 employees and not have to cover insurance under Obamacare. She acts as any other person and just has to have health insurance once the mandate goes into effect. So if your company kept their insurance, she'd just stay with you and nothing would change. If your company dropped you as you think they might, then you would get private insurance in the exchange, which, again, shouldn't hit your $4500 mark.
Must pay penalty or rate no matter what in order to provide health care to the people who do not have health care.
To say it's in order to provide health care to those who don't have it is kind of disingenuous at best. We currently provide people who do not have health care in that hospitals cannot turn them away when something is life threatening, and that means we currently pay for their bills when they cannot. We pay in increased medical costs.
The other thing is that the penalty is, oddly enough, completely and utterly toothless. You don't have to pay it at all. The very most they could do is send you a strongly worded letter. The act explicitly states you can't be fined or have anything garnished from wages and you can't be put in jail. They can do nothing.
The % rate for Mom based on last year income is approx $4000 dollar per year. $4000 + $4500=$8500 per year
On top of those numbers not being known at all, mom will likely get tax credits for being a small business. You could also get tax credits and subsidies because you may fit between 133% and 400% of the federal poverty level.
And, lastly, we don't really love Obamacare that much. While you seem to see it as a handout to those who don't have insurance, that's not really the case. It's more of a handout to insurance companies. We would much prefer a single payer system, which would really hit to the heart of the matter of rising health care costs. Medicare for all should (and likely will) be the banner that we should fight for. Medicare's administration costs are 1% of what's put into the system. That means that literally 99% of the funds put into medicare are going to actual medical costs. With the Obamacare mandate private insurance only has to hit 80%. With a "Medicare for all" solution, there would be a larger risk pool, and costs for everyone would go down to begin with. Along with that, then our government could put pressure and negotiate to lower costs across the board. Quite frankly it's unacceptable that we pay literally double what most other civilized nations around the world pay in health care costs. The system is bloated and doesn't work. Obamacare isn't great, but it is better overall than what we had. It's a cruddy stop-gap solution until we get to actual health care reform.
