President Obama might reach his 6 million Obamacare enrollee goal, but not people have been pining to sign up for affordable health insurance.

The explanation for the sudden surge of enrollees rests on good, old-fashioned fear. People are getting worried as companies, such as H&R Block, explain just how high the penalties for not obtaining coverage will be, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The $95 fine doesn’t sound like much, but remember: the fine is $95 or one percent of your income, whichever is higher:

One H&R Block handout for people who visit a branch specified that a married couple with two children filing jointly, and making $58,500 a year, would be hit with a penalty of $350 in 2014, then $975 in 2015 and $2,085 in 2016—far greater than the $95 many people assume they’re eyeing.

As Lucia Jones, who coordinates an enrollment campaign in Kansas, said, “The government knows if you can afford it, and then you have to have it.”

Of course, this was all part of the president’s grand plan. But something about these scare tactics screams “totalitarian.”

Not to mention the American Action Forum released a report for yesterday’s fourth anniversary of Obamacare that revealed that “the ACA has imposed 2.5 times more costs than it has produced in benefits”:

“To put the ACA’s paperwork burdens in perspective, it would take 79,518 employees (more than the population of Napa, California) working 2,000 hours annually to complete the ACA’s paperwork mandates,” the report said.

The report found an increase of $4.5 billion in higher costs and 48 million additional paperwork hours since last year.

Fantastic. Not only is the White House intimidating patients into purchasing plans they don’t want, the cost of Obamacare far outweighs any of its temporary benefits. When we have a $17 trillion debt, we shouldn’t unwisely spend more money on failure.

As previously noted, this might be part of a greater scheme to coax Americans into a single-payer system. But with any luck, receiving penalty letters will push the electorate in the opposite direction. Many of them are only signing up for health insurance because it seems a better use of money than paying a monthly fee.

In the end, this doesn’t prove that Obamacare is a general good; it simply proves that the government can force you into doing things you don’t want to do.