Posted on 12/03/2014 10:20:29 PM PST by grundle
Q. My husband gets health insurance at his job for $130 a month, but adding me to his plan would bring our total cost up to $415. We can’t afford this on an income of only $40,000 a year! Do we have any recourse
A. Grrrr, no. You are among several million victims of the infamous “family glitch” in the Affordable Care Act. And the most infuriating thing is that it didn’t have to be this way.
As we explained just the other day, you can’t get a tax credit to help pay for health insurance if you have the option of signing up for a plan that costs you less than 9.5 percent of your annual income. (This percentage rises to 9.56 percent in 2015.) That's considered an "affordable" plan.
If you are a single person, that’s where the story ends. But if you have a spouse or kids who also need insurance, there’s more—and for people like you, it’s a story with a bad ending. Here’s why.
According to the interpretation of the law by the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department, if a worker’s individual coverage is affordable, the entire family is considered to have “affordable” employer coverage—even if, as in your situation, adding a spouse or kids to the plan drives up the price way above the 9.5 percent threshold. Here’s an infographic we created that explains this glitch clearly.
I did the math on your situation. Your husband’s plan is clearly “affordable” because $130 a month works out to about 4 percent of your annual income. But adding you to the plan brings your total cost up to 12.5 percent of your income, which is ridiculous.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
$1300 and something with the latest raise that starts in January. That’s medical only. If you add in our dental it’s over $1400 per mnth.
2 people, me and hubby. ;(
CR is run by clueless liberals (serious greenie whackos, too). For an organization that claims to be a champion of consumers, it is a perpetual cheerleader for government intervention in all markets.
As for Obamacare, I just got a promo from Blue Cross to purchase an Obamacare plan through them. My husband just lost his job and we are on COBRA now, which is costing us a bundle. I assume COBRA sends out names to insurance companies in an effort to foist victims, er, customers, off on the government plans.
It makes me furious. The glossy brochure emphasizes the possibility of subsidies. You know, free money... money that just materializes out of thin air? My husband is looking for another job, but even if he can’t find one, we won’t have the government force other people to pay our bills.
Pricing should be more open and competitive. Heath care is one of the few industries that get by with manipulating things to keep prices high.
As for drugs, some will simply cost a lot due to the cost of research, materials, rarity, etc. It is no more fair to make someone else pay for your wife’s medication than it is to make someone else pay for a car accident — or whatever else tragedy befalls a person. If insured, one hopes their plan covers those things. That’s where competition can help. But the shoppers who wants to save a little month by month so they choose to not have flood insurance (to choose an example in another category) may end up hammered if they are hit by a flood. It is sad, but it is not the job of others to pay unless they CHOOSE to.
Many medical conditions are no fault of the patient. Unless we want socialism we must take responsibility ourselves as free people. And here is a newsflash people tend to forget: Sickness, death, dying, pain, suffering, are all part of life on this earth. No amount of money or treatment will entirely take that away. And that sort of suffering is intrinsically unequal. Yes in some categories life is not fair. It is a bad move to expect the government to fix that.
It's all about redistribution. Even if SCOTUS does rule against obamacare, in any form, I seriously doubt insurance companies will go back to 2009 premium rates.
2014 we paid, for my husband and myself, $575 per month for coverage with a 10k deductable. For 2015 that policy will be no more and the cheapest we can find is $1000 p/month (!!!) with a 6k deductable and nothing is covered, not once single office visit, until the deductable is met.
We will be uninsured so we will have to pay the penalty. The feds throw salt on the wound as they refer to the penalty for not purchasing insurance as the "shared responsibility fee". No kidding. It's right there on the healthcare.gov website. Bassturds.
Yup, that’s a lot of money. You’ve probably noticed the many blank stares of indifference when describing the costs to others.
Basic coverage — 2014 was a disaster. I intentionally avoided the exchange but was rolled into without any clear statements from the insurer after I made the policy commitment. To make matters worse, we couldn’t keep our doctors unless we paid out of pocket.
So in 2014, thanks to Obamacare, I’m paying 15% more, we lost our doctors, and I’m paying additional costs related to alternative clinics, and higher deductibles. And then there’s the 2015 rate hikes...
We pay more for insurance than a lot of people make. And no one cares.
I thoroughly agree!
Of course, much of the MSM is trying desperately to convince Republicans that most Americans actually like ObamaCare; they would just prefer a few minor tweaks, here and there...
When I had group coverage, it wasn’t this bad.
This leads me to wonder if things went south due to Obamacare.
If the guy had a wife and a few kids, then perhaps the rate isn’t that bad.
I approve of non-employee rates like this. Employers used to give coverage to attract employees, but the rest of the family was usually a higher rate, and that was reasoned, I thought.
My comments may have misled you, but I was addressing the 45 million not covered used to justify Obamacare, then the 50 million after it was implemented, and the fact that now more middle-class people’s insurance coverage has been screwed with as a result.
I don’t like that end of it at all.
It was all one big pack of lies.
Sadly, I pretty much agree.
And NPR and PBS sound more like a round table by a 1980s U. S. S. R. television station.
It’s just weird to listen to them lost in another century.
“The important thing is to ask this question of yourself and your family: If YOUR insurance went from $360 to $920 per month tomorrow, could you afford to keep it?”
We were considering dropping the insurance but unfortunately, my wife tore her ACL in her right knee while hiking last week which will require surgery, so we are going to bite the bullet and pay the inflated premiums until we can find an alternative (concierge doctor). We discussed having the surgery performed in her home town of Chihuahua, MX because it’s so much less expensive but after considering the travel costs combined with the actual surgery we decided it was more economical to remain in the US and have the procedure done locally.
However, we greatly appreciated your post. It was very well thought out and contained an excellent grasp of the situation facing small business owners. Thanks.
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