I guess we have to start recording the phone conversations and then transcribing them to have a record in case of a penalty.
So how is this going to be remedied? Everyone says to wait, but I don’t really see that solving the problem. I would think a blitz of complaints might speed-up the supplementary training that is so obviously needed. Perhaps we should all flood our congresspeople with complaints (if/when we can get through to them!). That’s what I will be doing.</p>
<p>Question: I understand that our subsidy / credit for 2014 will be based on our 2014 income. So if I estimate that we’re going to make $80,000 in 2014 and we get $X subsidy, but if we end up making $100,000 and should have gotten only $Y subsidy, we will owe $X - $Y. </p>
<p>But say we end up making only $60,000 and $Y would have been bigger than $X. Will we get a REFUND of $Y - $X?</p>
<p>MaineLonghorn, the short answer is YES, you will get a tax refund. </p>
<p>The subsidy is a tax credit. So if your income estimate is too high and you end up earning less than you said you would, so that you would have qualified for more subsidy than you got during the year, you will get a tax refund… provided you bought your insurance on the exchanges.</p>
<p>It took me forever to find this, so in an effort to help anyone in Monmouth County or Ocean County, NJ I post this info. I know there are lots of people on CC from NJ.</p>
<p>The Foodbank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties will have trained Health Care Marketplace Navigators available during the month of October to answer questions and help with applications. See their website [Foodbank</a> of Monmouth & Ocean](<a href=“http://www.foodbankmoc.org/]Foodbank”>http://www.foodbankmoc.org/) for information about locations and times. (Scroll down a little from the top).</p>
<p>I’ve requested an appointment, but haven’t heard back yet.</p>
<p>MaineLonghorn, I think Calmom upthread recommended that people eligible for subsidies might want to overstate their income estimate somewhat, so as to get a tax refund at the end of the year. And I agree with that suggestion. </p>
<p>If you look at just the rational perspective you’d rather make your most accurate income estimate, because just numerically you’d be better off getting the subsidy through the year rather than having to come up with extra money each month for your insurance premium and then getting the money back at the end of the year. But people are not rational, and we’d rather get a refund than run the risk of having to come up with the money for a tax payment at the end of the year because we underestimated our income. Plus, a tax refund functions as a sort of forced savings.</p>
<p>Everyone who works there is brand new, same with navigators unless they are people who works in agency offices who chose to pick up navigator designations.</p>
<p>If you go to McDonalds, do you want the new cashier? The grocery store? Anywhere? No matter how fantastic the training, it takes time on the job to see how things work out. No one you can talk to at Healthcare.gov or your state or a navigator, none have experience with healthcare at all. No one, even your agent or accountant, have ACA experience. It is going to take time to work it out.</p>
<p>Like I said, I have taken the courses in person and online in various states. I would not be exaggerating when I say CalMom knows as much as anyone else i have spoken to, I believe because she is pursuing it based on having had real life experience with having health insurance. If all the people advising you have and have had employer provided insurance, this whole thing is theoretical to them. If they have always had a W2 job, it may not occur to them that many people don’t have predictable income.</p>
<p>MaineLonghorn (re post #699 about your account creation problem) – I received a tip from someone that if you have unsuccessfully tried to create an account at Healthcare.gov, you should clear your browser cache before trying again (especially if you are seeing error messages). I don’t know whether that works or not, but I thought I’d pass it on. </p>
Somemom, I am sorry to say that I came to that exact realization myself, which is why I set up my own blog over the weekend. I think my legal background plays a part – when I couldn’t get straight answers anywhere about topics such as how to calculate MAGI, I went back to read the law and regulations. </p>
<p>But I shouldn’t have to do this. I understand the training issue and I don’t fault the new hires or the volunteers who have trained as navigators, but I think that the official agencies involved have had plenty of time to develop and issue clear guidelines on many of the issues that are causing confusion.</p>
<p>And the web design for the online portals to sign up at both Healthcare.gov and CoveredCa.com is appalling. I think the main, informational sites are fine – but when you click the link to set up an account, you are entering sites that simply aren’t anywhere ready for launch. Lots of very basic, rudimentary problems that I wouldn’t ever expect to see on a live site.</p>
<p>I think many of the government agencies have a requirement not to allow development in another country. They spend enormous sums of money doing everything in US and then redoing them when they don’t meet expectations.</p>
<p>Inexcusable? Wellllll… it’s easy to criticize software if you’re not the one who has to write it. I’d agree that the sort of error that MaineLonghorn points out is a bad error and needs to be fixed. It would be inexcusable for it not to be fixed, and I hope, MaineLonghorn, that you were able to figure out a way to report it. But that it’s there in the first place? That’s just because people are imperfect.</p>
You don’t need to overstate income for that reason. You are NOT required to take an advanced tax subsidy – even if eligible you can set your own options for how much, if any, you want to take. The instructions are very clear on that point, though I haven’t yet seen the web interface for setting it all up. </p>
<p>But you can go ahead and enter your real income, and then simply opt to take less than your full advance tax credit to leave some breathing room. For example, if your income would entitle you to a $400 monthly subsidy, you could choose to take only $200 per month.</p>
<p>The place where you might want to overstate income would be in a situation where your current income put you below 100% of the poverty line and you want to be eligible for a subsidy, either because you live in a non-Medicaid expansion state, or because you don’t want to be on Medicaid. </p>
<p>Obviously lying about anticipated 2014 income produces its own set of problems – which I won’t get into – but there could be people in situations like my son. My son is in grad school full time and his income for 2012 and 2013 is well under the FPL, but he will graduate with a Masters degree in the spring and is very likely to get full time employment in June. I’ve talked to him, and he is actually quite comfortable with Medicaid, so he’ll just file based on his current income – but if he preferred to buy real insurance, then of course it is more likely than not that his 2014 income is going to be significantly higher than 2012 and 2013.</p>
<p>I was thinking about why the software for the rollout is buggier than prominent software rollouts from the private sector. One reason, that might not be obvious, is that in the private sector, deadlines slip. They always slip, always. Software is not ready when it should be, and so the release is delayed. But in this case, October 1 was always a hard deadline.</p>
<p>YES, but I believe ONLY if you have purchased your insurance via the exchange.</p>
<p>If you expected to make too much money to be subsidy eligible and opted to buy a different plan off-exchange, and then your income falls short – then you probably will not be eligible for a refund, even if your plan is from the same company and exactly mirrors an eligible exchange plan. </p>
<p>I’m not 100% sure but I’ve read the law and regs and that’s the way I read the language. So even if you go to the insurer’s web site or call their agents to learn about provider networks, you are going to want to buy via the exchange. Some, but not all, insurers can do that for you – that is, you may be able to ask the agent from Insurance Company X to set you up on the exchange, with the appropriate financial info. Anthem told me they would do that; the Kaiser site looks like they might; and Blue Shield said that I’d have to sign myself up for the exchange – so I think that’s more of a customer service issue. A private insurance agent would be able to do it for you, however – so if you are throwing up your hands in exasperation, you might just want to work with a licensed insurance agent. The licensed agents will get a small commission for signing up people on the exchange, and they do not charge the insurance buyers for their services.</p>
<p>CF, you are right about deadlines, but only kind of. Believe me, in the private sector there is a lot of pressure to have things ready for launch. And in any case, a lot of the site problems are really amateurish problems. </p>
<p>The load problems are excusable. Bugs that show up only when individuals follow an unusual set of steps or enter unexpected information are likely in any system. But broken links on the home page or entry point drop down fields that are unpopulated (like the security questions) are not excusable.</p>
<p>The government software is generally built by private companies. Deloitte, for example, is a big supplier of custom software for government. </p>
<p>And there is a private company with a contract to support the healthcare exchange software. It’s Experian. You know, the data and credit ratings giant.</p>
<p>The point is, whoever is building the software, whether government employee or private contractor, they are people writing software. And people writing software make mistakes.</p>
<p>You might wonder why the broken links on the home page and the entry point dropdown menu problems weren’t discovered in user testing, and we can only assume that they didn’t have the final software to test in user testing. Because deadlines slipped. Like they always do. I’m not defending this; I’m just saying it’s true.</p>
<p>Based on my training, CalMom is correct, you ONLY get subsidies on exchange policies.</p>
<p>Re: the websites, we do a great deal of online continuing education, so I am quite familiar with that type of interface. The ACA ones have been rough, very old school in feel, way too many wasted steps, way too much work, not as user friendly as the CE sites.</p>
* See [Reuters:</a> IT experts decidely not impressed with