OBAMACARE: $1.5 TRILLION Dollar Tax Hike For a Stadium Full of Troubles

The past two weeks has seen the administration and Congress float ideas on how to pay for the $1.5 trillion bill for Obamacare. Some of it surrounds empty promises of savings, much of it involves tax hikes . Some of these tax hikes even conform to Obama’s promise of not taxing people making under $250,000. They are designed to take money out of the hands of people who drive the economy. Proposed tax hikes in this category include: 1) capping the value of itemized deductions including gifts to charities; 2) a 3% surtax on households earning more than $250,000; and 3) a millionaires tax.

Not all of the tax suggestion revolves around President Obama's strategy of income redistribution, but they would force the President to break his $250,000 promise. Some of these taxes include: 1) a tax on soda; 2) a tax on beer; 3) an increase in employer and employee payroll taxes; 4) a flat tax on health insurance companies; 5) broaden the Medicare tax on investment income; 6) an employer mandate; and 7) a value added tax on everything but food, housing, and Medicare.

President Obama recently told the press: “And I’ve said very clearly, if any bill arrives from Congress that is not controlling costs, that’s not a bill I can support. It’s going to have to control costs. It’s going to have to be paid for.” But as CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf told the Senate this week, nothing in their current health care proposals will actually reduce health care costs. Instead, Elmendorf explained, the left’s health care plan only “puts an additional long-term burden on top of an already unsustainable path.”

With the economy already buckling from runaway spending and an oppressive tax burden, if enacted, will Obamacare help fix the heath care system? Rick Scott says it will just give us a stadium full of troubles:

Let's start by imagining a professional football stadium, with a fence around the field itself from sideline to sideline, goal line to goal line. If you poured out $1.5 trillion dollars worth of $100 bills, it would cover the entire field and create a pile of Benjamin Franklins over 12 feet high - taller than the cross bar on the goal posts. That is how much taxpayer money - yours and mine - Congress has to confiscate in order to pay for a government-run health care plan that few, if any, really need.


That's a massive pile of cash. And here's just a sample list of other government programs or projects and what they have or would cost:

* The entire Space Shuttle program, from the 1970's development and testing all the way up until now - including nearly 120 launched missions, cost $150 billion.

* The inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo Lunar Program that put 12 astronauts on the moon was cheaper - only $140 billion.

* The cost to build 20 brand-new Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, and the cost of operating all of them for 10 years each, would only set us back $150 billion.

* One tank of gas, per week, for every car in America, for an entire year, would cost $510 billion.

That much spending, all together, totals $950 billion. But we would still have another $550 billion left inside the football stadium. If we were standing on the field, the pile of confiscated tax dollars would still up to our necks.

That's pretty much where America will be, too, if Congress takes over the health care system - up to our necks in debt. Everyone will be stuck with a much higher tax bill, whether it's in the form of paying taxes on our existing employer-paid health benefits, or all of us paying higher prices for "sugary drinks" and other things as Congress has proposed. And what will we have to show for this embarrassing orgy of spending by our government? We'll be stuck with a government-run health plan that rations care, forces us onto unacceptable waiting lists, and denies us lifesaving drugs we desperately need. In short, Congress wants to spend all that cash on a plan nobody wants.

Even more frightening is that Congress is proposing this health care boondoggle after already flushing $787 billion down the drain on a stimulus package that, we are just now learning, "wasn't enough." At this very moment, the leading proposal on Capitol Hill is the "public option," which is a nice way of saying "government-run health care." The plan would create a government-managed health insurance coverage option that would compete with existing insurance coverage, and likely even force insurance providers out of business. That, in turn, would force more Americans to turn to the government for coverage, costing taxpayers even more, and ultimately driving the country further and further into an ever-growing cascade of debt that we'll never recover from.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves, do we really need this? Do we really want to gamble not only our health care system but our financial future on a scheme that almost certainly will cost more and accomplish far less than Congress predicts?

This is all part of Rahm Emanuel's pledge of taking advantage of a crisis by shoving the entire liberal agenda down the public's throat all at once.  We will end up with a sham program, that will be enacted by a congress that didn't read the bill and have not thought about the real implications of what they have voted on.