No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Is there no end to the stream of bad news and negative consequences of obamacare?

Evidently not.

No good deed will go unpunished under ObamaCare. If a charitable hospital treats a homeless person who staggers into the emergency room without insurance, it may be punished with taxes and fines.

One of the "unintended" consequences of the misnamed Affordable Care Act was to place charitable tax-exempt hospitals in a medical Catch-22: To maintain their tax-exempt status they're required to treat a minimum number of patients who can't pay, yet ObamaCare requires everyone to have health coverage.

Right now, about 60% of the 6,000 or so hospitals in the U.S. are tax-exempt nonprofits, while 25% are government-owned. The rest — fewer than 1,000 — are for-profit. But this may change under provisions of ObamaCare to be enforced by the IRS.

The end result is that charitable hospitals will now undergo harsher scrutiny and face fines when treating uninsured people.

The Internal Revenue Service’s Section 501 goes into effect under Obamacare. The provision stipulates new financial penalties for charitable, tax-exempt hospitals that treat uninsured poor Americans. Currently, 60 percent of American hospitals fall under this category.

Analysts explained that charity serves as a major deterrent for the uninsured to enroll in Obamacare, so the Obama administration is fining charitable hospitals.

To put a face on the impact of this particular provision of that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned obamacare, we have to look no farther than last spring's terrorist attack during the Boston Marathon.

The nonprofit hospital that treated the final victim of the Boston Marathon bombing attack will have its tax-exempt status reviewed under Obamacare and could face hefty fines and other penalties.

Boston’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, which treated amputee Marc Fucarile as he recovered from the loss of his leg in the April 15 terrorist attack, is run by a nonprofit 501(c)3 hospital network that will be subject to new scrutiny of its tax-exempt status and potentially massive fines under Obamacare.

Just the latest in a long string of atrocities committted under the umbrella of obamacare...