<p>This may have been covered before, but I just received notice from Anthem Blue Cross that we will have to select a new plan for 2014, which is based on their offerings under Obamacare. However, today I went to the website to review the new plans and I don’t see anything like Silver, Bronze, etc. </p>
<p>Instead I see our $400/month plan (daughter and I only) now becomes a $1,000/month plan? Is this what is going to happen to everyone that has insurance, is not low income, not high income and self-employed?</p>
<p>axw, alimony is included in MAGI but not child support – basically if there’s not a place to write the number on a 1040, it isn’t going into MAGI. If you really don’t want Medicaid, then maybe you can consider doing what I suggested in post #339.</p>
<p>Coralbrook, have you checked on your state’s exchange to see what is available for you in your situation? Will you qualify for a subsidy? I think the cutoff is $62K of income, for a family of two.</p>
<p>I looked on CoveredCalifornia (<a href=“http://www.coveredca.com%5B/url%5D”>www.coveredca.com</a>), with a random San Diego zip code and ages of 50 and 21 (I made them up) for a family of two, and saw premiums that were in the $500-700 neighborhood. $1000/month sounds high. I suggest seeing what the exchanges have; you can probably do a lot better than $1000/month.</p>
<p>Coralbrook, go to the exchange site coveredca.com, not the Anthem site. The plans are the same, but on its own site Anthem is calling the bronze plans “core direct access”. </p>
<p>But don’t do that NOW. Wait about 10 days. Neither the Anthem site nor the Covered California site has the network information online yet, and the Covered California site is still running slowly with frequent stalls and down time. I went through the process of signing up at Covered California in part so that I would know what the process is, but I really am advising anyone else to wait. </p>
<p>If you are absolutely sure that you will not qualify for a tax credit, then you can buy the plan directly from Anthem, but I think that most middle-income self-employed will want to be on the exchange because of the possibility of the tax refund. Most self-employed individuals have a somewhat fluctuating income – it’s always possible that you might have a bad year. So I think you want the possibility of a tax refund for excess subsidies even if it you think it’s unlikely. </p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that we still have the self-employed health insurance deduction. So if you do end up paying the higher premiums, it will at least reduce taxable income. </p>
<p>Thank you, calmom. That seems to make sense for me. How are “they” checking up on people who don’t file tax returns? None of my income is taxable, so I’m not required to file.</p>
<p>I believe that if you take the subsidy, then you will have to start filing tax returns for 2014 onwards. I might be mistaken, but I would be very surprised if it were otherwise – the health care subsidy is an advance tax credit, so it’s similar to the earned income credit – you have to file a return to claim the credit. In the case of ACA, I think you are essentially being given an advance, interest-free loan against the credit that you are claiming.</p>
<p>If you are Medicaid eligible, then I think they will just take your word for it – they probably will do some spot checking in the same way that some FAFSA’s are selected for verification. You will be providing your social security number as well as authorization for them to use that cross-check with IRS records, so it wouldn’t really be possible for someone who was really earning plenty of money to expect to get away with a lie.</p>
<p>"“But when you add people over 65, it does become a vast majority.
Bingo! Which is why “the (random) person on the street” just doesn’t care.”</p>
<p>Which would have made sense if you’d have said that in the first place…instead of, “Stupid question. The vast majority of folks receive health care from their employer.”</p>
<p>But hey, not like I’ve ever left out major parts of an argument before…
Though actually, I think most people do care. The websites wouldn’t be slammed with so much interest if people didn’t care. I think the reality is, the news reporters show whatever interviews they choose to. They could interview 100 people, and only show the one person who seems uninformed. It’s all biased, based upon what they want the conclusion to be.</p>
<p>I agree, busdriver. These are all online training courses, so I have not attempted to ask any one any questions, the phone lines for technical difficulties has a long wait.</p>
<p>Out of curiousity, H looked up what Covered CA would cost us if he didn’t have insurance through work. He was shocked. $16,000 per year with a $10,000 deductible! $26,000 per year at a minimum! That’s more than the mortgage and the property taxes combined. And much, much more than we paid a few years ago, when he worked for a start up and we did self insure. And this whole scheme was promoted as saving the average family $2500 per year.</p>
<p>TatinG, I think you mean $26000 per year at a MAXIMUM. That certainly is a very high cost. Fortunately, you don’t have to pay it.</p>
<p>Now, let’s consider whether your family would be an average family, such that you would be the kind of family that would save $2500 per year. I doubt it, because if you were the average family, your family income would be about $50K, your insurance cost would be guaranteed to be less than 9.5% of your income, about $5K, and you would indeed be saving a ton of money.</p>
<p>Very few families on CC are average families. So just because something is true for average families doesn’t mean it’s true for CC families. </p>
<p>We’d pay $18K-$20K for our family of three, depending on which plan we picked. (The Covered California website isn’t working for me; when I click Show Details on a plan I just get the same page back. But I can see the premium costs for all the levels.)</p>
<p>The point is that at those prices, people will not sign up. For a family like ours with two kids in college, a mortgage, taxes, it would simply be unaffordable.</p>
<p>It seems like an easy choice. You can become homeless or have the kids drop out of college or you can just not pay your taxes. Any of those things. Then you could afford it. ;)</p>
<p>It’s worthwhile considering who we are talking about, who would have to pay such prices. As far as I can see, it’s people 50-64, who earn more than 400% of the poverty line, and who don’t have insurance through their employers. Those people are going to get slammed. Of course, they were already being slammed before the ACA, because insurance for them was already prohibitively expensive if they could get it at all.</p>
<p>As someone upthread, the wonderful Calmom I think, pointed out, healthy people in their fifties and early sixties who were buying their own insurance are going to see premium increases. That’s because it is now illegal to cherrypick and offer insurance only to healthy people. On the other hand, previously uninsured unhealthy people in their fifties and sixties are better off; they can get health insurance, where they couldn’t before.</p>
<p>I am not 50, have two kids through college and another one currently there, currently have insurance, but didn’t and went through finding a policy a few years back. I self insured at the time for much less than I could today with the new plans. I am not seeing the discounts, either. It is simply more costly than what I have now.</p>
<p>I saw the same prices as TatinG. </p>
<p>Of course, people in that same age group could buy catastrophic insurance only, but not anymore. Nobody will be able to, except those under age 30.</p>