Tax Preparers Getting Tax Dollars to Sign You Up for Obamacare?

by Warner Todd Huston | February 19, 2014 5:36 pm

It is tax season and Americans everywhere are taking their receipts and forms to their favorite tax preparer to find out what that final tally will be. But are our tax preparers getting a cash bonus from the taxpayers to sign customers up for Obamacare while they are filling out our tax forms? It seems so.

This new waste of tax money–possibly illegal, definitely unethical–came to light when Will Upton made to write a piece on Obama’s attack[1] on those that want to defund Arkansas’ “private option.” In Arkansas, legislators made a move to mitigate the disaster that is Obamacare (ACA) by passing a law colloquially known as the private option.

As Upton explains it, the private option is “essentially an expansion of Medicaid eligibility, under the auspices of Obamacare, to any Arkansan under 65 years old who is at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level.”

As the funding for this state-level Obamacare fix is up for approval, Obama and his cohorts are blanketing the state with attacks on defunders of the private option. In particular is a study floated by tax preparing company Jackson-Hewitt claiming that defunding the private option is nothing but a tax hike on the business sector.

“The study assumes that affected employers will not provide insurance coverage,” Upton writes. “It makes no argument as to why this is a better assumption than, say, assuming 100 percent of employers will provide coverage. The study is based off an arbitrary premise that businesses that employ workers who fall into the Medicaid-coverage gap will refuse to cover those employees, opting instead to pay the federal tax penalty.”

Even if the whole of the report is accepted as fact, only 20 percent of Arkansas businesses would be hit with any higher costs. But at that rate, it would be better to find a small percentage of businesses having higher costs than to have a program that now costs Arkansas up to $100 million in 2014 and would later explode to $400 million by 2023.

In conjunction with this story, though, now we are also finding out that tax preparers in Arkansas and across the country are getting paid bounties to sign people up for Obamacare. Yes, our tax dollars are going to pay off tax preparers to push Obamacare on the American people!

This idea was floated[2] last November in the pages of Forbes by Howard Gleckman, a member of the left-wing Urban Institute and a columnist.

It was also reported in October that Jackson-Hewitt was “unconcerned[3]” about the troubles of Obamacare and intended to “help” customers figure out how to signup for the President’s disastrous take over of our national healthcare system.

Now we find out that Jackson-Hewitt’s employees are getting bounties of $50 per head for signing people up, so its no wonder that the company was “unconcerned” over Obamacare. After all, they were going to reap a reward because of the law!

Tax preparers aren’t the only ones getting a bounty to sign people up for Obamacare. Last October, it was also reported[4] that those so-called “Obamacare navigators” were also getting a $58 per head bounty to sign new people up for the ACA.

This is Obama paying people your tax dollars to sign people up for his own disastrous healthcare law. It is all pretty unethical and it is certainly a waste of our tax dollars.

This boondoggle grows every day.