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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (16008)	4/2/2010 8:59:14 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

No its very hard to enforce even with an army (not that 16,500 would be much of an army). Its easy to make very modest enforcement efforts, to grab a few people, punish them, and hope that encourages the others. But if the punishment is just making them pay the penalty than there won't be much incentive to pay up front to avoid the risk. If the punishment is more like what the IRS does to people who don't pay what the IRS thinks they should (interest, penalties, liens, seizure of assets, possibly even prison), than whether or not its administered by the IRS doesn't make a lot of difference. Its very hard to enforce the purchase on 300+ million people (or 250 million or so adults, or 115 million or so households), except perhaps by harshly penalizing the relatively few you grab, or by having a really big army scrutinizing people's activities.