WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor previewing tax day in America, April 15th. Barrasso specifically details how American taxpayers on Obamacare are forced to fill out even more forms this year.
Excerpts of his remarks:
“Tomorrow is April 15th. April 15th is a date that causes a great deal of stress and anxiety for hard-working American taxpayers.
“For millions of American families, this year is going to be worse than ever before.
“The Obama health care law, Obamacare, is making tax day harder for Americans.
“American taxpayers who were forced into the Obamacare system—well they’re having to fill out even more forms this year than in the past. So many forms that the Internal Revenue Service can then enforce all of the president’s health care mandates.
“It is a complicated and a burdensome process.
“Now President Obama promised that buying health insurance through Obamacare was going to be as easy as buying a television on Amazon.
“Well, why didn’t the president ever say that it was going to be so difficult to satisfy the IRS?
“Why didn’t the president say that hard-working American taxpayers would have to fill out pages and pages of forms just to find out if they had actually paid the right amount for their health insurance?
“Why didn’t the president say that people who changed jobs during the year might have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to the IRS?
“That doesn’t happen when you buy a television on Amazon. Amazon tells you the price – and that’s what you pay.
“Amazon doesn’t make you fill out forms on April 15th. Amazon doesn’t demand more money from you—after the amount that you’ve paid. But that’s what’s happening to millions of Americans across the country.
“Taxes were already too complicated. Now, because of Obamacare, it is much worse.
“For this year’s tax filing season, the IRS released seven new forms that people might have to fill out to comply with the health care law. The instructions alone for these forms are 46 pages long.
“Now, a married couple with two children might have to enter numbers and other information into 133 individual boxes on just one of the new Obamacare tax forms.
“A family could spend more time filling out one of these forms than they used to spend filling out their entire tax returns in the past.
“So for people who go through all of this effort, the results actually can still be terrifying.
“CNN ran a report earlier this year about this problem – the headline was, ‘I have to pay back my Obamacare subsidy.’
“They told the story of Janice Riddle, from Los Angeles. Now, she got an Obamacare subsidy last year. Then, when she got a new job, she forgot to tell the IRS about the new job.
“Now they sort of knew because she was getting paid from the new job. She was paying taxes but she didn’t actually alert the IRS about it from the standpoint of Obamacare.
“So when she was doing her taxes this year, she learned that she has to pay back the entire amount of the subsidy – more than $5,000.
“She told CNN, ‘I’m in shock, but I have no choice. Do I want to argue with the IRS or the Obama administration?’
“Well, Janice is not alone. The Obama administration says that as many as 7.5 million families in America will have to reconcile their Obamacare subsidies on their taxes for 2014—when they do the filing deadline tomorrow.
“According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation last month, only four percent of all the families that qualified for a subsidy got the right amount. Just a four percent success rate.
“The study found that half of all U.S. households that were eligible for a subsidy, they would have to pay back some of it with their taxes this year.
“The average amount they’re going to have to pay back is $794.
“One of those people who just found that he owes the government so much money is Rob Tuck, from Dublin, California.
“According to an article last week by the Associated Press, he said he had expected to actually get a refund for his taxes—a refund of $400 for his taxes, for his work for last year.
“It turns out that his refund has been almost ‘wiped out’ to repay some of the subsidy he got to buy an expensive Obamacare policy.
“He changed jobs during the year, he got a little extra income. In America, that should be a good thing—you get extra income. Well, not for him—it came with a large price tag from the government.
“He said he enrolled in the plan to avoid the tax penalties for being uninsured, and he says that now he feels penalized by the Obama administration anyway.
“Another person who’s feeling penalized by the president’s health care law is Bill Preus of St. Petersburg, Florida. He was quoted in the same Associated Press article last week.
“This man was only on Obamacare for three months. After that time, he went onto Medicare. Well there was poor coordination between the Obamacare website – Healthcare.gov – and his insurance company.
“Because of that he may have to pay the IRS close to $4,000. Now the man used to own an insurance agency.
“According to the article, ‘He is used to complexity, but said he never has seen anything like this.’
“He told the Associated Press, ‘It’s a total mess.’
“His tax preparer and the IRS both told him that the best thing to do was to file an incomplete return so that it would trigger an audit and then they could sort things out.
“Is that the president’s idea of his health care plan being as easy to use as buying a TV on Amazon?
“This man has to go through an IRS audit. That’s what they’re hoping for—to get audited by the IRS. Apparently, that’s the easiest way for Washington to figure out its own rules. It’s outrageous.
“And then the president in the past has been asked about the health care law. He said it’s actually working better than he expected. What did he expect when people are telling stories like these?
“Well the president’s health care law was more than 2,000 pages long.
“It paid for thousands of IRS agents—people to investigate American taxpayers – to make sure they comply with all of the law’s destructive and expensive mandates.
“But all of that complexity has become a disaster.
“This law has been bad for patients, it’s been bad for providers – and I will tell you as we reach the IRS filing deadline tomorrow, it’s clear that the law is terrible for taxpayers.
“This isn’t what Democrats promised – and it’s not what the American people wanted.
“People didn’t want more red tape, more stress. They just wanted the care they need, from a doctor they choose, at lower cost.
“That’s what Republicans in the Senate are working to give them.
“We can do it without more IRS audits.
“We can do it without a 2,000 page law.
“We can do it without making tax day harder for Americans.
“We can do it without all the negative side effects of Obamacare.”
###
http://www.barrasso.senate.gov
Twitter | Facebook | You Tube