<p>Sax, thanks. :)</p>
<p>I have a question for this board.
A employee and his family receive employer based health insurance and they only pay half the premiums.</p>
<p>The employee retires. Now he is on medicare. The rest of the family still gets to stay on the employer plan.</p>
<p>Does the family now have to pay taxss on the half of the premiums they don’t pay for?</p>
<p>@taxguy…can you help with above question?</p>
<p>It’s quiz time. Who made these remarks about how to decide if Obamacare is working? No cheating or searching the internet for the answer.</p>
<p>“Well, I think success looks like having many millions of people sign up. What is important–because I think the conflation here is an estimate, one of which, by CBO, was 7 million, of a total number of enrollees and what that means. Obviously, the more enrollees there are, that’s a measure of success. But in terms of how effective the marketplaces function, the makeup, the mix of the population that enrolls is more important than the total number. And that’s why so many efforts are under way to reach different populations with the message of the options available to people for quality, affordable health insurance.”</p>
<p>Without looking, I think it’s Ol’ Handsome Joe. </p>
<p>Wrong…but you are close.</p>
<p>I should have realized that it wasn’t him because there was an entire paragraph with no “literally” in it.</p>
<p>“The employee retires. Now he is on medicare. The rest of the family still gets to stay on the employer plan.”</p>
<p>Isn’t that highly unusual? I would think the rest of the family would lose the insurance once the employee retires.</p>
<p>no “literally” in it.</p>
<p>True…he also can’t say that word without flashing that huge toothy grin of his.</p>
<p>CF, since you came so close, i am going to spill the beans. It was Jay Carney, the President’s press secretary, who made the remarks a few months ago when the numbers weren’t looking so good.</p>
<p>All valid comments, GP, but in terms of numbers, don’t you have a little contrition jig to perform for us? :)</p>
<p>It’s been interesting to view the early results of what I consider to be/take a sea change in terms of magnitude. For me, the other shoe won’t have dropped until there’s a reliable sorting of the network and some common sense closure to the loopholes, cliff, etc. but that will take years. Good thing I am a patient person :)</p>
<p>I am, however, happy and hopeful that the first early hurdle of the volume milestone is passed because it holds the promise of momentum.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that the last wave of signups will also result in a large demographic age shift in the overall numbers.</p>
<p>But in defense of the doubters, as Stephen Colbert observed… “No one could have foreseen that college kids would put something off until the last minute.”
See: <a href=“The Colbert Report - TV Series | Comedy Central US”>The Colbert Report - TV Series | Comedy Central US;
<p>^^ If I were really bored, i’d go through this thread and find every post where someone predicted that the last-minute signups would tilt toward the young. There were a lot of those posts. (I know that Colbert was being facetious :-))</p>
<p>Based on what happened in my area the last minute sign-ups tilt heavily toward those who were recruited by community organizations, meaning the heavily subsidized. So, the who is paying for this question continues to be an enormous issue. </p>
<p>We don’t know who the last minute signups are, unless someone has information released by the exchanges or the insurance companies. We saw inspirational long lines of people recruited by community organizers, but over a million people signed up in the last five days, and the long lines of people don’t add up to anything close to a million people. Most people had to have signed up online or by phone.</p>
<p>Ehealth’s price index showed the average age staying at 36, as it had been for the last couple of months. Their average age was 41 in mid-December.
<a href=“https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/affordable-care-act/price-index”>https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/affordable-care-act/price-index</a></p>
<p>If I were really bored, I’d go back and (you just know what I’m going to say,) count the number of predictions of utter doom, beginning with hardly anyone signing up. So far, the sky did not fall, Henny Penny.</p>
<p>What I find much more interesting is the number of naysayers predictions that are now facts. Head-counting was never my issue, though. If it’s free, people will take it. That’s not surprising. </p>
<p>Interestingly, Robert Gibbs is nor predicting that the employer mandate will disappear. Apart from a nice sounding concept and a bunch of new state agencies there doesn’t seem to be much left of this law.</p>
<p>
I’m interested in what taxguy has to say but I don’t think it’s taxable. Did the person receive a W2? Look at box 12. If it’s code DD then it’s not taxable. If it’s code W, however, and you live in California then to compute the California AGI the person has to adjust his income by adding the HSA amount.</p>
<p>Krillies, thanks. Hasnt happened yet so I dont know details.</p>
<p>I seem to remember the phrase “death spiral” on this thread, which was shorthand for not enough people signing up.</p>
<p>No. “Death spiral” referred to the ‘wrong’ people signing up. That is primarily the older and sicker. </p>