DESPITE ALL OF THE HYPERBOLE FROM THE DEMOCRATS AND THE MSM ABOUT HOW THE AHCA WILL KILL PEOPLE, HERE IS WHAT THE BILL ACTUALLY SAYS AND DOES.
Key Provisions of H.R. 1628 a.k.a the American Health Care Act of 2017 with added commentary in parenthesis.
After FY 2018, all unobligated funds going to the A.C.A. for investment in prevention in public health programs will be rescinded. (Decentralizes funding and gives states more discretion in how this money is spent.)
Ammends Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 to increase funding for community health centers. (Funding to local community health centers increased)
Medcaid eligibility goes back to pre-ACA thresholds for children from 6-19 and phases out the ACA Medicaid expansion between now and 2020 while eliminating the ACA mandated essential benefits for Medicaid plans. (Slows the progress of moving towards single payer)
After 2019, eliminates cost sharing reductions for low income individuals but reallocates those funds through 2026 to the states to use in assisting these high-risk individuals. (More power to the states)
No more tiers beginning in 2020. (The return of individual underwriting and competition)
Insurance premiums will be determined through underwriting and states will have the power to affect premium ratios if they so choose (More power to the states)
All fines for employers and individuals repealed retroactively to December 31, 2015.
Repeals ACA taxes. (Takes away power from the IRS and returns power to the states)
Enhances HSA plans across the board. Also adjusts the HSA contributions to match the sum of annual deductibles and out of pocket expenses permitted under a high deductible health plan. (People can take responsibility for their own health plans and purchase what they want.)
Repeals annual fee on branded prescription pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers. (Will lower drug costs for everyone)
Repeals annual fees charged to insurance providers based solely on their market share. (Decreases costs of medical coverage for consumers.)
Repeals tanning salon tax. (So….who did this target exactly?)
Repeals net investment income tax. (No more class warfare and soaking the rich. This had nothing to do with health care or health insurance.)
So, why are the Dems and the MSM so upset about this bill and spreading misinformation and trying to scare everyone? Well, this is because they realize that this bill will be a major step backwards for them in their quest to centralize power into an ever expanding and overreaching Federal Government which can eventually just implement a single payer system.
Here is the actual text of the bill so you can read it for yourself and then compare what it says to what the Dems and MSM say that it says.
Last week, the IRS dealt a major blow to Obamacare as they released a statement saying that they would no longer reject tax returns that did not indicate whether the filer had ACA compliant coverage for the year. And with that….the Obamacare individual mandate was dead thus there will be no more fines for not carrying ACA compliant health insurance coverage.
You can read all about it right here: http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/14/irs-blow-to-obamacare-individual-mandate
Now, this does not apply to the group market…….yet! I anticipate that within the next 100 days or so, those taxes, fines, penalties or whatever the Democrats were calling them at any given time, will also be a thing of the past.
So, does this move by the IRS kill Obamacare all together? Well…no it doesn’t. But perhaps those looking at this action taken by the IRS who say, “Well, the fines were much less than the premiums so this doesn’t mean a whole lot”, fail to understand the significance of what just happened.
You see, we Americans have a rich history of fighting against oppressive governments and oppressive tax systems. In fact, at the birth of this country, a group of patriots boarded a ship in Boston Harbor and dumped that ship’s cargo overboard in protest of “taxation without representation”. So while we certainly don’t like excessive taxes being imposed upon us for things that we purchase and activities that we engage in, we particularly do not like finding out that we were now being taxed for NOT doing something. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia said in his dissent against Obamacare, “If the government can do this, what can it not do?”. So while the fine/tax/penalty was negligible, the principle behind this was monumental.
I believe to this day that Obamacare is unconstitutional and was passed by the most dishonest group of people who proved that for them, no lie was too big to tell. What the IRS just did removed one of the major barbs of the Obamacare law that was shoved into the sides of the American taxpayer and THAT is why this is so significant.
Today, I had the opportunity to attend a leadership breakfast with Congressman Kevin Brady and Rafael Cruz. While I was there, I had the chance to speak with Congressman Brady’s Chief of Staff David W. Davis. We discussed this move by the IRS and I told him that I believed that the next crucial thing that needed to happen was for the government to get out of the business of designing health care plans and remove the 10 essential benefits that Obamacare requires a plan to have to be an ACA compliant plan offered to the public. I told him that I believe that this will open up the market for people to be able to purchase the coverage they want and create competition which will drive down costs. I also predicted that we would immediately see a huge increase in HSA plans in the market and this too would drive down costs. He was very receptive to what I was saying and told me that they were working on just those things right now.
Sounds like things are moving in the right direction……finally.
How empty is theory in the presence of fact! – Mark Twain
Back in 2009 when there was this push by the Democrats for Socialized Medicine, they bombarded us with this message that the outcomes of our health insurance system were awful and specifically, they pointed to the infant mortality rate in the United States as compared to other countries as an prime example of this. So…..I started researching this because I just could not believe that in a country where we have the highest ranked hospitals and doctors in the world and we have hundreds of thousands of people coming here each year for medical care from countries that have socialized medicine, that those assertions could be true.
What I found after some research was that all countries don’t calculate their infant mortality rates in the same way. As such, the 1:1 ratio comparisons that the proponents of a single payer system were presenting as “facts” to push their agenda were just not valid. Nevertheless, people wrote op-ed pieces citing these “studies” and this big lie soon had legs and was repeated over and over. Here it is famously quoted in a Youtube video that went viral where at the 2:41 mark, it is stated that the United States ranks 178th in Infant Mortality. To those who heard this and believed it, the truth was inconsequential. For them, the matter was, and still is, settled.
Now, this was not my first experience in investigating such things that seemed ridiculous at first glance and then turned out to be just that. I have found the same type of statistical tap dances used in calculating unemployment rates, tax rates, crime statistics and well….just about anything involving numbers that someone can whip until they can confess to whatever they want them to. Once the bogus stats are circulated and believed, op-ed pieces are written referring back to these flawed statistics and anyone who is challenged about it, points back to the original “study” as if it is the gospel. So, is it even possible to find the truth with so much propaganda and false “studies’ out there? Who has that kind of time to wade through all of this and dig down to the data sources? Is it even possible in most cases to find who is putting up the money or who is commissioning these studies and publications? I know that I don’t have that kind of time so I had to come up with another way to try and figure out what was going on.
I considered the ongoing health care debate and how every time a study was debunked about a particular issue, the proponent of socialized medicine would simply cite yet another study or just change the topic altogether. Since they already believed what the were saying, nothing would change their mind so it really became pointless and frustrating to even have the discussion with them. For this reason, at some point I just made the decision to start using the Democrats own words against them while making no judgement over whether what they were saying was true nor did I question how they gathered their data. Here is an example of this from 2009 where Obama himself quotes the stat that over 30 million Americans being uninsured. This was repeated by Democrats and the MSM pretty much daily leading up to Obama signing the PPACA (Obamacare) into law in 2010.
So, was it really true that we had over 30 million Americans who were uninsured in 2009? If so, who were they? Were these uninsured people not carrying insurance simply because they chose not to pay for insurance? Was it the case, as the Democrats implied or just flat out said at times, that all of those people could not get insurance because they had pre-existing conditions or were just too poor to afford it?
You see, they never really tell you where or how they get their numbers. They just throw them out there and if you disagree with them, you are heartless and greedy for not wanting others to have access to health care. They even came up with the term “health care denier” to describe those who pushed back about the misinformation they were disseminating. At some point during the course of the debate, they even redefined “access” to mean health care provided at the expense of the tax payer. Now if you push back on this, they then try to tell you that the American tax payer is paying for it anyway so we may as well have “socialized medicine”. You see what they did there?
So, after my experience in researching infant mortality rates and discovering how this data was manipulated and abused to push an agenda, I just stopped chasing these idiots around the tree and just decided to use THEIR own numbers and words against them. And that brings me to where I am now with all of this.
When Obama and the Dems claimed that we had over 30 million uninsured, I said….”okay”. Bernie Sanders then gave speeches when he was running for president a few months ago claiming that we had 29 million uninsured Americans. Again I said, “okay”. With a quick check of the United States census data, I noted that we also grew the population by just over 15 million or so since 2009. Again….these are not MY numbers, these are THEIR numbers.
So today, when the Democrats tell us that we have 20-30 million newly insured people because of Obamacare, I just have to throw the B.S. flag. I do this not because I am a Conservative but because of….well……MATH. I won’t even talk about how many of the newly insured are Medicaid enrollees because that just opens a whole new can of worms with people just wanting to debate the origin of those numbers and then introducing other competing studies, op-eds etc etc into the conversation to further muddy up the discussion. In other words, a huge waste of time.
Despite all of the bluster and obfuscation, here is what we know for sure……Right now, today, we STILL have over 30 million people uninsured in this country according to the CBO. I only use the CBO because Democrats cite them as a credible source from which they get their numbers for their talking points on health care. So, by using THEIR OWN NUMBERS AND SOURCES, and then comparing what they are claiming today and how it compares with their own sources, it is absolutely clear that they are lying to the American people yet again.
To put it plainly, you can’t have roughly the same number of uninsured people today that you did when you started the process, add just 15 million to the population and then claim that you helped 20-30 million people gain insurance because of Obamacare. That just did not happen.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. – Mark Twain
THE 2017 BATTLE OVER OBAMACARE – WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
BACKGROUND
What was the situation with health care in the United States before the PPACA (Obamacare) was passed in 2010 by the Democrats?
Leading up to the Democrats passing Obamacare into law, there are many videos of President Obama and the Democrats decrying that we had 30 million uninsured people in this country and that health care costs were out of control and rising every year. The Dems insisted that “something” had to be done and they did not let this crisis go to waste. The Democrats accepted zero GOP input on the PPACA legislation and then passed it into law without even one GOP vote. So in short……they own it.
Where we are today, 7 years after the PPACA (Obamacare) has been the law:
According to the CBO, we currently have 32 million uninsured Americans and this can be viewed here http://www.usdebtclock.org/. During Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign in late 2016, he stated that we still have 29 million uninsured so it is obvious that the Dems are very much aware of the actual number of uninsured Americans we still have.
So even considering that the U.S. population increased from about 309 million in 2010 to 324 million in 2017, we still have over 30 million uninsured so what significant thing did the PPACA (Obamacare) really accomplish? Also, since the Medicaid expansion accounts for more than 80% of the newly insured, why was this not the ONLY thing that was passed instead of this Leviathan known as Obamacare? So, what exactly did the American tax payer get through the passage of Obamacare?
The cost of Obamacare is hard to pin down but even the most conservative estimates are in excess of $2 TRILLION. These are tax payer dollars that are just gone.
Americans have fewer carriers to choose from as some of the larger, established companies such as Cigna and Humana are gone.
Americans have fewer plan choices as the carriers have been forced to eliminate HSA plans and catastrophic plans because they are not Obamacare compliant.
Out of pocket costs including deductibles have increased.
What is the Democrat plan to fix Obamacare?
The publicly stated position of Democrats is to insist that the law is working and that anywhere from 20 to 40 million people are now insured as a result of Obamacare.
The Dems also claim that the GOP has offered no plans to replace Obamacare.
The Dems further claim that repealing the law will cost the tax payers “billions of dollars”.
Since it is well documented that we still have over 30 million uninsured Americans, the first talking point of the Democrats is very misleading as it does not tell the whole story.
The GOP has offered several plans to replace Obamacare over the last 7 years and these can be found online. Here are a couple of them but there are many more.
Once again, what the Dems are saying is just not true.
The third point the Dems make is that the cost of repealing Obamacare will cost “billions”. The Dems throw this number around without any sort of independent study or data to back it up. It seems that the sole intent of this statement is just to scare people into leaving the law in place even though the law is obviously failing.
What we do know for certain is that Obamacare has cost the American taxpayers in excess of $2 TRILLION and we have more uninsured than we had before while the costs to the taxpayers are still rising rapidly.
So….what should we do?
Well, the fact is that the largest percentage of Obamacare participants (about 70%) are Medicaid eligible. In other words, people are using the $800 million Healthcare.gov website as nothing more than an online signup portal for Medicaid, a program that we have had in place since 1964. We already paid for that website so perhaps that should just continue to function as the Medicaid enrollment portal that it is.
If I were calling the shots, my health care plan would look like this….
Controlling Medical Costs – The companies that already exist to calculate “reasonable and customary” costs for insurance actuaries could publish these costs studies so that Americans would have informed consent when seeking health care. The current plan of not knowing what you will be charged for services until you receive the bill is absolutely insane and is rife with graft. A component to this website could be added to review doctors and facilities. Just imagine being able to choose the doctor and hospital that you can afford and feel comfortable with. Again, “free market” solution here. – THE COST OF MIGRATING PRICING DATA TO A NEW WEBSITE WOULD BE MINIMAL.
Medicaid Patients – If Medicaid is something that the American people want to continue, Medicaid income eligibility levels should be established through Federal legislation and these should be tied to fluctuating inflation rates. Those with pre-existing conditions which preclude them from obtaining health insurance on the open market would still be eligible for Medicaid…..just as they have been since 1964. – THE ADDITIONAL COST OF THIS WOULD BE ZERO SINCE MEDICAID IS ALREADY IN PLACE.
Increased Competition – Insurers should be able to compete across state lines in a true “free market” model. The plans they offer will be based on consumer demand and costs just as a “free market” should work. Even so, this will probably not drastically reduce premiums since actuaries will still use regional cost models to determine premiums. However, it could level out premiums by increasing competition. – THE COST OF REMOVING ENCUMBRANCES TO COMPETITION WOULD BE ZERO.
Individual Responsibility – Those who are not Medicaid eligible because of their income levels will be responsible for purchasing their own health insurance. If someone chooses to go without health insurance and they experience an illness or injury requiring costly medical care, they will be responsible for those medical costs. Those debts will NEVER go away until they are paid or negotiated with the providers. Again….this is how the “free market” and “individual responsibility” works. – THE COST OF THIS TO THE TAX PAYER WOULD BE ZERO.
State Controlled – States should have risk pools, a clinic system and a re-insurance program to address the 5% of medical occurrences that account for 50% of the health care costs each year. This would require a nominal tax increase but the money saved should more than offset the costs.
HSA Accounts – While I don’t like big government “solutions” at all, we should consider transitioning Social Security to an HSA format. Just like SS, everyone would have it at birth but they would control their own accounts for life. The accounts would have triple tax savings for contributions, earnings within the HSA, and qualified distributions just as traditional HSA plans do. I would also suggest that these would be legacy accounts that stay in each family and can be transferred all or in part without penalty to family members or anyone they might designate. When the holder of the account passes away, the account should just pass to the family. This is BOLD but makes more sense than the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security right now.
Building the Wall – For Illegals using our Emergency Rooms, we should treat them, identify them and their country of origin, deport them if they are here illegally and then bill their country of origin for medical costs and the costs of deportation. The money saved could go to border security.– COST TO THE AMERICAN TAX PAYER IS ONCE AGAIN……ZERO.
March 23, 2015 will be the fifth anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) more commonly known as Obamacare. While the President and the Democrats continue to tell the American people that Obamacare is a rousing success, the Republicans, as well as people’s insurance policies and medical bills, seem to say something totally different. So I have come to realize that the truth of whether Obamacare is working depends on your perspective of what this law was supposed to do.
So why is there such a disconnect between what people of both political parties are seeing and saying?
Before Obamacare was passed, both parties and the majority of Americans were alarmed that medical costs were skyrocketing. Everyone called it “The Healthcare Crisis” and as President Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel likes to say, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Thus out of the “Healthcare Crisis”, Obamacare was born.
Now, recall that when the President and the Democrats were pushing Obamacare through congress without a single Republican vote, they were decrying that we have 30 million uninsured Americans that were in need of health care. They promised that not only would the Obamacare law get those 30 million people insured but that every family would save an estimated $2,500 per year in health insurance premiums. They also went on record as saying, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” Remember that? Well, let’s examine where we are now versus where we were then and compare it to the rhetoric being used then and now in support of this law.
Today, the President and Democrats like to say that more people are insured now than before the law was passed but that belies statistics provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. While they are on record as saying that 30 million Americans were without coverage when they were trying to justify passing the law in 2009, today we have an estimated 48 million uninsured. (Click on the link below to hear that 30 million figure directly from President Obama)
Here is a link with this 30 million figure being touted by the President and his minions.
You do the math. If we had 30 million uninsured before the law and now we have 48 million uninsured, you can only conclude that the President is either lying or is just horribly misinformed when he says that we have fewer uninsured now as a result of Obamacare. You can draw your own conclusions but the disparity is very obvious.
So what about that $2,500 in insurance premium savings that each family would receive?
Well, I don’t know of anyone who has “saved” any money in premiums. In fact, most if not all of the policies have become more expensive AND deductibles have increased while vital coverages such as prescriptions have been limited. Now, when any Democrat is asked about this obvious inconsistency, they have nuanced their position to say that premiums are increasing at a slower pace now than they have in years. Now, that is true but mostly because insurance premiums went up so much during the first two years since Obamacare was signed into law. So, not only did you not get your $2,500 but your premiums increased sharply and now continue to increase every year.
If you did receive your $2,500 in savings in 2010 and your premiums went down each year, please email me because I would love to hear about that.
So, could you keep your plan as promised?
Well as I said in an earlier blog entry, you can keep your plan……….
IF you are willing and able to pay a lot more for your current insurance plan.
IF your current insurance carrier is still in business and still offering your current plan.
IF your employer does not discontinue offering group health insurance due to the sharp rise in premiums.
The fact is, we went from thirty million uninsured and now we have an estimated 48 million uninsured so we know there are at least 18 million Americans who were not able to keep their plans.
So, is the Affordable Care Act working as it should?
Well, if the purpose of Obamacare was to drive up insurance costs while limiting access to physicians and driving up health care costs while simultaneously growing the size of the Federal Government then “yes”….it is working perfectly.
If the purpose of the law was to drive down medical costs, insurance costs, and get more Americans insured then “no”…..the law is undeniably a dismal failure.
As the P.P.A.C.A. nears full implementation on January 1, 2014, the taxpayer cost projections given by the Congressional Budget Office (C.B.O.) are crumbling before our eyes.
If you recall, the initial taxpayer cost estimate for the P.P.A.C.A. was about $900 billion. However, as of February 2013 the projected cost of the P.P.A.C.A had risen to closer to $2 trillion and climbing. Keep in mind that government program cost estimates are historically ALWAYS very low. (See Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid cost projections when those programs were implemented).
Last week, the “Medical Device Tax” built in to the P.P.A.C.A. to help reduce the costs of the P.P.A.C.A. came under fire by both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. When the vote to repeal this tax was taken, it was truly a bipartisan vote as 79 of the 100 Senators voted in favor of repealing this tax. If the Medical Device Tax is repealed it will obviously affect the C.B.O. score so they will have to re-evaluate and come up with another cost projection.
In addition to the lost revenue that the P.P.A.C.A. will have to absorb if and when the Medical Device Tax repeal is complete, there is also another factor that will drive up the cost of the P.P.A.C.A. even further.
You may recall that Medicare Advantage was targeted for cuts in the P.P.A.C.A. and those revenues were being calculated in to reduce the projected cost of the bill. Well it was announced today that this money that the P.P.A.C.A. was purported to be saving by cutting Medicare Advantage payments is not going to happen either. In fact, the Medicare Advantage payments to the private carriers and providers will now increase under the P.P.A.C.A.
While all of this news was very significant, this was not the only news today regarding the P.P.A.C.A. It was also announced today that the Small Business Health Options Program (S.H.O.P.) portion of the P.P.A.C.A. has been delayed until 2015.
S.H.O.P. was supposed to help small businesses get more affordable coverage for their employees and was one of the key selling points used by Democrat congressmen when presenting the P.P.A.C.A. to their constituents. While on the surface, this looks like bad news for business owners, it may very well be a blessing when you consider the IRS projected costs of the exchange plans. Could it possibly be that someone is trying to “slow walk” this part of the P.P.A.C.A. to avoid any negative impact it might have on the 2014 elections?
Stay tuned for the new CBO cost projections. I am betting they will eclipse $3 trillion.
The image on the right is the ever growing list of regulations for the PPACA. In just one day, 828 pages of new regulations were added and at last count there were over 20,000 pages of new regulations added since the law was passed. Is it any wonder that small businesses are confused about how the PPACA will affect them?
This will be the first of several posts regarding the PPACA and small businesses which is defined as those businesses with less than 50 employees.
If a business has less than 50 employees, they do not have to offer health insurance and they will not be penalized for not offering health insurance.
However, if a small business meets these three conditions, they will be eligible for tax credits.
a. They cover at least 50% fo the cost of single health coverage for each employee
b. They have fewer than 25 full-time employees
c. They pay average annual wages below $50,000
The tax credit currently covers up to 35% of health insurance expenses for small for-profit businesses and up to 25% for non-profit businesses. In 2014, these credit amounts will increase to 50% and 35% respectively.
While that sounds like great news for small business owners, consider that premiums are skyrocketing so it remains to be seen if there will be any real savings at all for small businesses. Also, consider that employers will only be required to pay for 50% of the employee’s coverage. The spouse and children of the employee will be left exposed to those large premiums or will be forced to go to the exchanges.
This is a question that I hear more than once every week. Well, there are certainly a lot of reasons why premiums can go up. Historically, the most common cause of escalating premiums had to do with the amount of claims paid by the insurer as well as the contracts between carriers and providers changing. However, when the P.P.A.C.A. was implemented, premiums began to skyrocket. The question is, “How did the P.P.A.C.A. make premiums go up?”
First of all, did you know that the P.P.A.C.A. actually dictates how profitable insurance companies can be? The law states that as of 2012, eighty five cents of every dollar an insurance company receives in premium payments must go to pay claims. If these private insurance companies do not pay that money out in claims, the law requires that the remainder of that eighty five cents of every dollar must be refunded to the insurance company’s customers.
So, what happens when someone pays less in premiums but racks up many thousands in medical bills? Well, the P.P.A.C.A. makes the private insurance companies incur those losses up to 4%. After the insurance company pays 4% of the losses, the government, using tax payer dollars, pays the insurance company for any further losses. As such, if you understand the concept of “risk” and what insurance companies do, you would see that they are assuming much more risk due to the P.P.A.C.A. so premiums will necessarily go up.
In addition, the P.P.A.C.A. requires insurance companies to pay an additional $8 billion in excise taxes (arbitrary taxes) to the federal government beginning in 2014. This amount rises to $14.3 billion by 2018. So, simple economics should tell you that when the cost of providing something goes up, so does the cost of that which is being provided.
So, why are your premiums going up? Well, mostly these higher premiums are what these insurance companies are doing to try and offset the losses caused by the P.P.A.C.A.
I tried to keep this brief but there is a lot more involved.
The P.P.A.C.A. calls for these “exchanges” or “market places” to be set up this year and for enrollments to begin by October 1, 2013. The effective dates of these plans will be January 1, 2014.
At the time that this article was written, only 17 states were setting up their exchanges. There are 26 states that have told the Federal government that they would not participate in the exchanges and 7 states have opted to partner with the Federal Government. So, as a result, the Federal government will have to set up exchanges in 26 states and help in 7 others.
The concept behind the exchange is to have private insurance companies underwrite plans for consumers to choose from. Prices will depend on each person’s age, income and whether or not they are a smoker or not.
There will be four levels of plans where medical bills are covered up to an out of pocket maximum. The premiums and percentage of medical bills covered are much more favorable the lower the income of the person.
Here are the basic outlines of the plans and all have a maximum deductible and an out of pocket maximum:
Subsidies are only available for the Silver level plans. If you make 400% or less of the poverty level which is $46,021 for an individual and $93,701 for a family, you will get some amount of tax payer dollars (subsidy) to help with the costs of your premiums.
So how much it will cost you and your family will depend on your financial situation. I should mention that the IRS estimates that the CHEAPEST plan will cost the average family about $20,000 per year.
The more I get to looking at this I have come to conclude that health insurance has become much more expensive now that it’s free!
“What does the P.P.A.C.A really do and how will it affect my health insurance?”
This is a question I get all of the time so I thought I would put this blog together to help people understand the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (P.P.A.C.A) or what is commonly known as Obamacare.
Experts from both sides of the political aisle argue over what the P.P.A.C.A. will do to the insurance market and the economy. No matter what your political views are, everyone agrees that if the law moves forward as it is, it will drastically change everything.
How will the law affect you directly? Beginning on January 1, 2014, you will be required to have health insurance or incur a small fine/tax/penalty at the end of the year. The amount of this penalty will be the greater of $95 or 1% of your income and there is an additional amount if your children are not insured. So, if you don’t have insurance now, you will be at least $95 poorer at the end of the year for violating the law but the amount it will cost you could be significantly more depending on how many uninsured family members you have and what your income is.
Now, the P.P.A.C.A mandates that health insurance “exchanges”, or what they are now calling “market places’, be set up in each state where people can go and get an insurance plan that will be underwritten by private insurance companies and premiums will be subsidized by the federal government based on each persons pre-adjusted gross income. ( I will do another article on these “market places” as there is much to explain.)
In short, premiums are going up for everyone but those making less money will be insulated from that to a large degree since they are receiving government subsidies i.e. taxpayer money to help them with their premiums. Those individuals making over 400% of the poverty rate ( $44,680 per year) will not be eligible for any subsidy.
Since premium costs under the P.P.A.C.A. vary by age, let’s just look at what a 40 year old who is not eligible for a subsidy will pay in insurance premiums.
If the plan is just for the 40 year old non-smoker, he/she will pay $5,400 per year in premiums. If the 40 year old has a family of 4 and their total household income is greater than 400% of the poverty level ($93,701), their annual unsubsidized premium will be $14,556.
So, when President Obama famously said, “If you like your current health plan, you can keep it.” He was telling you the truth but not the whole truth. The whole truth is that you can keep your current plan…….
IF you are willing and able to pay a lot more for your current insurance plan.
IF your current insurance carrier is still in business and still offering your current plan.
IF your employer does not discontinue offering group health insurance due to the sharp rise in premiums.
Hope this helps. Come back and check for updates or email if you have a topic you would like to see discussed here on my blog.
