Originally Posted by Henry

If you check the schedule for penalties for not meeting the individual mandate to purchase health insurance , you find that it's cheaper to drop your insurance and pay the penalty (they begin low, a couple hundred $ per year), and if there's a mandate that private insurer's must not deny coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions, you could simply wait till you're diagnosed with something requiring treatment, go buy some health insurance, and then drop it the minute you don't need it anymore and go back to paying a couple 2-3 hundred $ per year in penalties instead of that much and more per month for a HI plan.

Those who doubt the efficacy and sincerity of the Baucus plan might find the devil in those details.

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There is an age-old political tactic, so old and so venerated it's impossible to determine which party began it - and it's so old it may well predate both current parties - and its original authors are irrelevant because both parties have used it repeatedly, but it goes like this....

If you want/need to impose a tax, but the tax is known to be hugely unpopular among voters, certain to cost too many votes, you instead tax something or somebody those voters cannot do without, like utilities, fuel, food, etc. It works best if you impose this tax on somebody or something despised by the general tax-paying public, like, oh... big oil, big banking, big pharma, just about 'big' anything, as long as they are perceived - or can be made to be perceived - as an enemy of the common people.

So, you impose the tax on the 'big' target, they in turn pass the costs of the tax along to consumers - aka taxpayers - and the consumer/taxpayers grumble, piss, and moan, but most direct their anger at the forced middleman. In essence, the government has forced the target, via regulations and/or taxes, to become an involuntary tax collector.

Great gig.