According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, it’s not happening. The Hill reports

“Taxpayers earning less than $200,000 a year will pay roughly $3.9 billion more in taxes—in 2019 alone—due to healthcare reform, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official scorekeeper.

The new law raises $15.2 billion over 10 years by limiting the medical expense deduction, a provision widely used by taxpayers who either have a serious illness or are older.

Taxpayers can currently deduct medical expenses in excess of 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. Starting in 2013, most taxpayers will only be able to deduct expenses greater than 10 percent of AGI. Older taxpayers are hit by this threshold increase in 2017.

Once the law is fully implemented in 2019, the JCT estimates the deduction limitation will affect 14.8 million taxpayers — 14.7 million of them will earn less than $200,000 a year. These taxpayers are single and joint filers, as well as heads of households.”

Here is more, as if this wasn’t enough. Over at the Washington Examiner Marie Grace Turner gives a list of the new taxes brought to you by “Obamacare.”

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If the goal of the President’s proposal was to drive doctors into hospital based practices or community health centers, or if it was to break the spirit of providers and bend them to the will of the government that holds the threat of criminal prosecution over their heads if they are found to be Medicare cheats, or if the goal was to dumb down the practice of medicine by ramping up the power of the HHS secretary and the evidence-based medicine posse, then the President’s proposal for health care reform was successful.

However, we as physicians are individuals. There are approximately 890,000 doctors currently practicing in the US. Those of us who want the autonomy to practice medicine the way we were trained, those of us who run a private practice who are entrepreneurs at heart, those who are tired of being pitted against our patients and other physicians (the specialist vs. primary care physician meme), and those who are just sick and tired are NOT going to take this. Those of us who can will retire or leave medicine all together. Those within the system will simply opt out.

The President’s summit on Thursday amounts to nothing more than six hours of theater. Not one physician in Congress has been invited to attend. The physicians for single payer have also not been invited. It is his chance to hear from the people on the front line, and it is obvious this bill is NOT about the health of our people. It is about raising revenue, controlling the medical industrial complex completely. How else can you explain the proposal for the government to a) take over control of the cost of insurance premiums; b) limit provider medical decisions based on cost, and c) control what is medically covered for the patient. Under the proposed health care reformed, the government will control how much an insurance company can charge, decide what is covered medically, and sanction the provider for deviating from the norm.

These are some of the proposal highlights that concerned me the most:

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