Middle Class To Foot Biggest Bill for Obamacare

Bait and switch, suckers

When President Obama was selling his signature health care reform bill back in early 2010, he described it as the "largest middle-class tax cut for health care in history." The costs would be largely paid by taxing insurance companies "that stand to gain a lot of money and a lot of profits" and by making "sure that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share on Medicare."

The press at the time picked up this theme. The New York Times, for example, called ObamaCare "the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago."

But a closer examination finds that ObamaCare's three biggest taxes — a Medicare surcharge, the so-called Cadillac tax and an insurance premium fee — will increasingly hit the middle class because of how the law indexes them for inflation and medical costs.