We Did Raise Taxes on Some Things': President's Obamacare Admission

President Barack Obama said Tuesday during an interview at the Clinton Global Initiative that his administration was compelled to increase some taxes to help fund his signature health care law.

“First of all, I think it’s really important to point out here that the total cost of the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance for every American out there at an affordable rate is costing about the same amount over the course of 10 years as the cost of the prescription drug bill that President Bush passed — except that wasn’t paid for,” president Obama told former President Bill Clinton, who was conducting the interview.

[sharequote align="center"]"We did raise taxes on some things."[/sharequote]

“We felt obliged to actually pay for it and not just add to the deficit,” he added.

But this is where things get interesting: “We did raise taxes on some things.  We, for example, said that for high-end income individuals, you can pay a slightly higher Medicare rate -- Medicare tax. So we bumped that up a little bit.”

He continued, adding that certain employers currently offer “so-called Cadillac” health care plans where there’s no incentive to “actually spend wisely when it comes to healthcare.”

You can watch the president’s remarks here [at the 45:00 mark]:

In response to the president’s remarks, the Grover Norquist-founded Americans for Tax Reform published Wednesday a partial list of Obamacare’s new or higher taxes:

3. Obamacare Medical Device Tax:

Medical device manufacturers employ 409,000 people in 12,000 plants across the country. Obamacare imposes a new 2.3 percent excise tax on gross sales – even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year. In addition to killing small business jobs and impacting research and development budgets, this will make everything from pacemakers to artificial hips more expensive.

2. Obamacare High Medical Bills Tax:

Before Obamacare, Americans facing high medical expenses were allowed a deduction to the extent that those expenses exceeded 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI).  Obamacare now imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI.  Therefore, Obamacare not only makes it more difficult to claim this deduction, it widens the net of taxable income.

According to the IRS, 10 million families took advantage of this tax deduction in 2009, the latest year of available data. Almost all are middle class. The average taxpayer claiming this deduction earned just over $53,000 annually. ATR estimates that the average income tax increase for the average family claiming this tax benefit will be $200 - $400 per year.

1. Obamacare Flexible Spending Account Tax:

The 30 - 35 million Americans who use a pre-tax Flexible Spending Account (FSA) at work to pay for their family’s basic medical needs face a new Obamacare cap of $2,500. This will squeeze $13 billion of tax money from Americans over the next ten years … Now, a parent looking to sock away extra money to pay for braces will find themselves quickly hitting this new cap, meaning they would have to pony up some or all of the cost with after-tax dollars.

[…]

There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children.  Nationwide there are several million families with special needs children and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education. This Obamacare tax provision will limit the options available to these families.

There’s more where that came from. Click here to see the rest of the list.

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Follow Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) on Twitter

Featured image Getty Images.

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