ObamaCare “Shared Responsibility Payments” Come Due on April 15, and It Won’t Be Pretty

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Let’s start by recalling that ObamaCare does not treat health care as a right, and is not structured to provide universal coverage. As we wrote:

ObamaCare conceives of health insurance as a “shared responsibility” — the fines for mandate breakers are called “shared responsibility payments” — between the federal government, state governments, insurers, employers, and individuals, except not employers.)

Another way of looking at this Orwellian language is that “shared responsbility” guarantees a role in the system for a type of business entity that has no reason to exist: The private health insurance company. That is ObamaCare’s basic requirement, and it drove ObamaCare’s system architecture (“the marketplace”) and its design. Again:

With a single payer system, “shared responsibility” would not involve handling a chunk of rent to the health insurance companies, since the tax system would handle this duty of citizenship.

All of the insane complexity I am about to describe — and which you are about to experience, on Tax Day — comes from ObamaCare’s central requirement. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
The ObamaCare Income Tax Logic Tree
Here’s a map of ObamaCare’s useless complexity at tax time; the numbered subheads below come from healthcare.gov). ObamaCare’s logic tree throws citizens consumers into three buckets, depending on how they consumed, or did not consume, their insurance coverage.
READ MORE:http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/obamacare-shared-responsibility-payments-come-due-april-15-wont-pretty-2.html