We first reported this travesty here. Now CitizenLink has picked up on it, hopefully spreading the word to millions more people. The welfare rules of the Great Society drove marriage out of the homes of the poor. The health care bill has the potential to drive marriage out of the middle class.
A closer look at premium payments in both the House and Senate health care bills shows higher premiums that might discourage couples from tying the knot.
For instance, in the House version, an unmarried couple each making $30,000 a year would pay $1,320 combined each year for private health insurance. If that couple chose to marry, their premium would jump to $12,000 a year, a difference of $10,680.
Allen Quist, a former Minnesota State legislator and current candidate for Congress, discovered the penalty while looking at numbers from the Committees on Ways and Means, Energy & Commerce, and Education & Labor.
“This extraordinary penalty people will pay, should they marry, extends all the way from a two-person combined income of $58,280 to $86,640, a spread of $28,360,” he wrote in a blog post. “A large number of people fall within this spread. As premiums for private insurance escalate, as expected, the marriage penalty will become substantially larger.”
The Senate bill includes a similar penalty.
“The Senate bill stipulates that two unmarried people, 52 years of age, with private insurance and a combined income of $60,000, $30,000 each, will pay a combined cost of $2,483 for medical insurance,” Quist wrote. “Should they marry, however, they will pay a combined cost of $11,666 for insurance — a penalty of $9,183 for getting married.”
Is this difference in insurance premiums enough to tip the scales from marriage to cohabitation? For some people, who are already loosely attached to the institution of marriage, the answer is surely yes. Once the principle of granting benefits to individuals rather than families is in place, the numbers can be tweaked to get any desired result.
Libertarians: are you sure you don’t care about marriage? The state has been, and is continuing to actively push people away from marriage. Why do you suppose they are so keen to break the family into individuals?
Christian liberals: are you sure you want the federal government to be the primary source of health care for every man, woman and child in America? The power to tax is the power to destroy. And the power to subsidize is the power to corrupt. The government is giving itself enough power to destroy what’s left of the family. They may or may not exercise that power at this particular time: but if this health care bill passes, they will have the power. Why do you suppose they want that power?
Wake up everybody: breaking the family into individuals empowers the state, not the individuals, and certainly not the family.