It's simple economic fact that a subsidy or other government benefit which decreases as your income increases is exactly the same as an income tax. It's called

It's simple economic fact that a subsidy or other government benefit which decreases as your income increases is exactly the same as an income tax. It's called "Effective Marginal Tax Rate" if you want to Google it. From the CBO; "The effective marginal tax rate (for brevity, hereafter referred to as the marginal tax rate) is the percentage of an additional dollar of earnings that is unavailable to an individual because it is paid in taxes or offset by reduced benefits from government programs." I mean, it seems almost ridiculous to say that buying health insurance & health care is a tax, but when the government is paying over a trillion dollars a year to buy health care for everyone except those who are too young or earning too much money, that's exactly what it's become. And I'm definitely not complaining that healthy people should not have to pay for health insurance. In fact the healthiest 50 percent of people who pay for health insurance use only 3.5 percent of services, it's what allows the entire system to work!