How much will implementation of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) provisions cost you as a taxpayer? If you want an accurate number, don't look to Fox News. Nick Kasprak over at the Tax Foundation's Tax Policy Blog recently provided a thorough takedown of the news organization's new health care reform "calculator", which is replete with faulty methodology, spelling errors, and meaningless graphics.

The calculator uses your annual gross income to place you in one of seven income brackets. The calculator then uses your bracket's "relative tax burden," or "the share of the total federal income tax paid by each income bracket," divided by the number of people in the bracket to determine your share of the overall cost of the health care program.

If that sounds like an exceptionally simplistic calculation, that's because it is. The calculator essentially says, "[N]ew spending on health care is a certain percentage of the cost of government;" "your tax dollars are responsible for a certain percentage of government spending;" multiply one by the other and ... Robert's your father's brother!

Moreover, the calculator entirely ignores other revenue sources of the federal government, including payroll taxes, the corporate income tax, and excise taxes. Without a "complete accounting of all sources of federal revenue," one can't even get the correct simplistic amount "of federal spending a particular group is responsible for."

Accompanying the calculation are several charts and graphs to...well, it's not exactly clear why they're provided or what value they contribute to a reader's understanding of the issue. There's also a poll at the end of the page for you to log either your support or displeasure with the new law, which is seemingly going to be based on your new empowering knowledge.

Of course, an ACA cost calculator could be very helpful. Kasprak notes:

[Y]ou're completely out of luck if you're interested (as most people would be) primarily in the marginal effects of the new taxes and spending cuts in isolation, which are the true cost of health care reform regardless of any nitpicky accounting issue. The burden of these changes is distributed to all Americans in a certain way, and that distribution has no relationship whatsoever to the current proportion of income taxes paid by particular income groups.

Maybe we should just count ourselves lucky Fox didn't title the tool the "Job-Killing Obamacare Calculator." Rhetorical moderation!

Image by Flickr user Twylo used under a Creative Commons license.