Posted on 10/26/2016 9:11:36 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The architects of the Affordable Care Act thought they had a blunt instrument to force people — even young and healthy ones — to buy insurance through the law’s online marketplaces: a tax penalty for those who remain uninsured.
It has not worked all that well, and that is at least partly to blame for soaring premiums next year on some of the health law’s insurance exchanges.
The full weight of the penalty will not be felt until April, when those who have avoided buying insurance will face penalties of around $700 a person or more. But even then that might not be enough: For the young and healthy who are badly needed to make the exchanges work, it is sometimes cheaper to pay the Internal Revenue Service than an insurance company charging large premiums, with huge deductibles.
“In my experience, the penalty has not been large enough to motivate people to sign up for insurance,” said Christine Speidel, a tax lawyer at Vermont Legal Aid.
Some people do sign up, especially those with low incomes who receive the most generous subsidies, Ms. Speidel said. But others, she said, find that they cannot afford insurance, even with subsidies, so “they grudgingly take the penalty.”
The I.R.S. says that 8.1 million returns included penalty payments for people who went without insurance in 2014, the first year in which most people were required to have coverage. A preliminary report on the latest tax-filing season, tabulating data through April, said that 5.6 million returns included penalties averaging $442 a return for people uninsured in 2015.
With the health law’s fourth open-enrollment season beginning Tuesday, consumers are anxiously weighing their options.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My daughter and her husband and two boys are doing one of those Christian health sharing organizations. It is costing them $300 a month. Costs are much lower because there is not a big bureaucracy to support. Members write their checks directly to the person needing it at the moment.
But if you look it up they can still add in penalties and interest for any amount that you owe past tax filing time. If you ever are due a refund then they will get you for all of that. I can’t remember how it works exactly, but you still get penalized in the end.
They used to say of something really, really crappy, “You couldn’t give it away!”
Now, people take penalties rather than accept obama’s horsesh*t.
Clearly, obamacare is worse than nothing at all.
A better idea: Remove the government entirely from Medicine and Insurance beyond guaranteeing weights and measures as the Constitution prescribes and by extension monitoring purity of product. Costs would plummet and research would skyrocket. Most of the cost of modern “healthcare” is salaries of bureaucrats and the costs of the incredibly extensive record keeping required and the regulation of everything involved by the Government.
[Members write their checks directly to the person needing it at the moment.]
They pray for them also. I’ve been in one for several years now.
Well said.
As I said. As the years tick by the amount you owe still acquires penalties which you will have pay to clear your balance. I don’t believe they can penalize you for underpayment during the current year the money would be due.
Well, then you just make sure you never get a refund. Solved. One should never want a refund anyways.
What I am saying is, the government is very much involved.
Hugely.
The government mandates everything. What we need is to get the government OUT of the business of healthcare.
But that is not even remotely possible at the moment. Until it is, we need to provide an alternative to Obamacare.
Because at the moment, it seems to be what millions of Americans need.
WHERE IS OUR ALTERNATIVE?
Where?
It's a lot of money for any one of us. It doesn't cover 1 day salary for the administration of Obamacare. Like everything else in government, it costs far more to manage than will ever be paid out. If it were a charity, it would be considered fraudulent when considering the % collected Vs. the % "redistributed" as benefits.
Exactly. Who ever heard of the IRS ever saying, “Oh, you owe it, but refuse to pay? Then never mind.”
We can have a free market, that is the GOP alternative!
People are actually acting quite rationally, though I imagine many don’t know it. The ACA includes a mandate in both directions, you have to buy it but they also have to provide it to you no matter how sick you are. The rational person who doesn’t have any ongoing health insurance would just treat that $700 like an catastrophic health policy. You pay cash for what you need, until something really bad befalls you, in which case you sign up for health insurance. The average person would put 10-15k into their pockets every year for 10-20 years in that way.
You know that if the democrats ever win back control(and they cheat very well) then they will fix it so that the penalty is owed just like the rest of your taxes.
Any alternative that involves government will metastasize and return to the same nonfunctionality that we have already. The only solution, interim or permanent that includes the government must fail for the users and the doctors though such is always a success for the politicians and the bureaucrats whose living it provides.
It's 10 times worse.
$5.6 million X 447=$2,503,200,000.
They still can’t make you pay those penalties and taxes if you do not send the money ahead of time. If you miscalculate and overpay a couple of hundred dollars well, then, you lose the couple of hundred. You just have to assume that all of the money you send to Washington belongs to Washington- no refunds.
With at least some of these groups you also have the option of going offshore for your necessary procedures. The organizations should probably make those alternatives known. It would reduce costs even more. I am on Medicare and have an Advantage plan that includes 50,000$ coverage out of country. That 50k out of country is like several times that much domestically.
If the Government was in charge of restaurants, then a hamburger would cost 50 bucks and taste worse than a Big-Mac. (if that is possible).
Same principle applies to health care.
We need more competition and free market solutions.
That being said, lots of people simply do not make enough money for health care and that is a big big problem.
The sheer brilliance of these so-called architects is just awe inspiring. The many years of training at institutions of higher learning, the hours of study, it really comes out.
Now, moving on to the advanced math section of this post....A $700 annual penalty (amounting to $58.33 a month) is...more.....or less....than $700 or $800 or $1200 a month...plus a $6500 (now more like $8000) deductible. Amounting to over $20,000. Unless you are pretty sick or need an operation...how many $500 visits to a doctor can you afford, if you pay cash? How about $1000 visits? How about $5000 visits? Now scholars have struggled with this apparent conundrum since the law was passed in 2009. Seven years later, it still presents something of a conundrum. Now suppose you needed a $20K operation? Maybe a $3K insurance policy, paid by all, would cover that. And then it would be done.
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