“Some 3 million to 6 million Americans will have to pay an Obamacare tax penalty for not having health insurance last year, Treasury officials said Wednesday. It's the first time they have given estimates for how many people will be subject to a fine.
The penalty is $95, or 1% of income above a certain threshold (roughly $20,000 for a couple). So you could end up owing the IRS a lot of money.
Take a married couple with $100,000 in income - their bill comes to $797, according to the Tax Policy Center ACA penalty calculator.
The penalty for remaining uninsured rises to the larger of $325 or 2% of income in 2015.”
“Finally, between 4.5 million and 7.5 million taxpayers received subsidies for insurance premiums when they signed up for coverage on Obamacare exchanges. They will have to use Form 8962 to reconcile their actual 2014 income with the amount they estimated when they applied for a policy in late 2013 or early 2014.
Those who underestimated their income either will receive smaller tax refunds or will owe the IRS money.
Treasury officials declined to forecast how many people may be in this situation. But H&R Block projects 3.4 million taxpayers will have to pay back part of their premiums.” - Millions to owe Obamacare tax penalty, CNN Money, 01/28/2015
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/news/economy/obamacare-tax-penalty/
“Being uninsured in America will cost you more in 2015.
It's the first year all taxpayers have to report to the Internal Revenue Service whether they had health insurance for the previous year, as required under President Barack Obama's law. Those who were uninsured face fines, unless they qualify for one of about 30 exemptions, most of which involve financial hardships.”
“In 2015, all taxpayers have to report to the IRS on their health insurance status the previous year. Most will check a box. It's also when the IRS starts collecting fines from some uninsured people, and deciding if others qualify for exemptions.
What many people don't realize is that the penalties go up significantly in 2015. Only 3 percent of uninsured people know what the fine for 2015 will be, according to a recent poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Figuring out your potential exposure if you're uninsured isn't simple.
For 2014, the fine is the greater of $95 per person or 1 percent of household income above the threshold for filing taxes. It will jump in 2015 to the greater of 2 percent of income or $325. By 2016, the average fine will be about $1,100, based on government figures.” - Being uninsured in America will cost you more, Yahoo Finance, 12/29/2014
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/being-uninsured-america-cost-more-163436765.html
Updated 01/09/2015:
Chart of the Week: How Much Will Obamacare Fines Continue to Rise? - dailysignal.com, 01/08/2015
http://dailysignal.com/2015/01/08/chart-week-much-will-obamacare-fines-continue-rise/
The paper It All Depends: “Sticker Shock” in Health Insurance Reform, Pauly, Harrington and Leive, Wharton School, 01/04/2014 the conclusion is as follows:
Conclusion
"This analysis of the change in total expected payment for those to be covered in post-ACA exchanges tells rather different stories about "sticker shock." On the one hand, among those who previously bought individual coverage, premiums generally increase only modestly if they choose the plans with the lowest bronze or silver premiums. While bronze premiums are lower than what was paid before, however, estimated out of pocket payments are higher, so the net effect is a moderate increase in TEP. If people choose to pay the median silver premium, the increase will be larger, but (at 25-30%) is still much lower than some of the estimates from the informal literature.
The sticker shock story is much different for the previously uninsured. The low income previously uninsured will have subsidies to cover much of the higher premiums and cost sharing to which they will be subject. But the previously uninsured who will receive minimal subsidies, who constitute a sizeable fraction of the uninsured population, are estimated to experience a very large increase in financial responsibility. Not only will they have to pay significant premiums but, because of increases in total utilization because of moral hazard or greater willingness of providers to supply care, their responsibility for out of pocket payment will also increase. They will pay a slightly smaller fraction of their total cost of care than when they were uninsured, but the total cost will increase to such an extent that the financial burden will rise.
We have not provided welfare calculations for this population. Such calculations would reduce the change in TEP by an estimate of the value to them of additional care (but by something less than the cost of that care), and by a small reduction in the risk of very high levels of OOP. One reason for this large increase in TEP is the small average OOP for the non-low-income uninsured in the CPS data, and this data may have underestimated the relatively rare event of a high out of pocket payment. Even so, it seems that this is the population that will be subject to the most severe financial shock from health reform."
Note: click the link below then once upon the page which the link leads you to, click the very first link in the column of links and it will take you to the un-gated pdf version of this paper.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22Sticker+Shock%22+in+Individual+Insurance+under+Health+Reform+mark+pauly
A worthy point within the paper is that the previously uninsured taking the largest total expected payment (TEP) increase:
"Given our assumptions, an insurance plan can be evaluated in terms of its "Total Expected Price" (TEP), defined by:
(1) TEP* = P* + OOP*
where P* is the average premium paid by persons in a given subgroup, OOP* is the average expected amount paid out of pocket, and TEP* is the sum of the "average person’s" premium and the average person’s expected value of out of pocket payments."
"The policy exemplar of an uninsured person is one who faces the risk of paying out of pocket for all of their medical care, which means either high financial risk (if care is used) or reduced access (if it is not). But the combination of charity and bad debt care, combined with the effects of incentives to seek out free care at emergency departments of hospitals, mean that the uninsured as a group do not either face or pay the full market price paid by insured patients. Somewhat surprisingly, this use of free or subsidized care even applies to the large minority of uninsured people who have incomes high enough that they could "afford" insurance (Bundorf and Pauly, 2006). So the relevant analysis of the financial consequences (though not the welfare consequences) from health reform that results in insurance purchase for this population compares their actual out of pocket payment when uninsured with the combination of premiums and out of pocket payments they will face under bronze and silver plans after reform."
Upon further review, will the uninsured remain uninsured because they already know how the system works i.e. "combination of charity and bad debt care, combined with the effects of incentives to seek out free care at emergency departments of hospitals". It would be a rational response to a price spike to avoid the price increase and remain at zero price. Further, not only do the uninsured understand how the system works, they may feel comfortable, in that, they have learned what to obtain health-care so why bother learning a new system (if it isn't broke, don't fix it).
“Last week, I wrote about an article in the Los Angeles Times, on a then-as-yet unpublished report from the RAND Corporation. The report indicated that only one-third of Obamacare’s purported 7.1 million exchange sign-ups were from the previously uninsured. But Noam Levey, the author of the Times article, didn’t disclose RAND’s actual findings as to the actual number of previously uninsured exchange enrollees. Well, now we know why. RAND published the full report yesterday; it indicates that Obamacare’s exchanges only enrolled 1.4 million previously uninsured individuals.
That 1.4 million is out of a total of 3.9 million exchange enrollees overall. That is to say, a little over a third of enrollees—36 percent—were previously uninsured. RAND’s figures don’t take into account the last few weeks of the Obamacare open enrollment period, and they contain a substantial margin of error, due to the study’s small sample size. (RAND surveyed 2,425 individuals aged 18 to 64; the 1.4 million figure has a margin of error of 700,000, meaning that there is a 95 percent probability that the actual number is between 700,000 and 2.1 million previously uninsured enrollees.)
If you assume that 80 percent of signer-uppers will eventually pay their premiums, the true number of previously uninsured exchange enrollees is likely closer to 2 million. That’s far from what the Congressional Budget Office has projected; the CBO estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the first-year enrollees would come from the previously uninsured population. Instead, it appears to be more like 24 to 36 percent.
Because the RAND survey is quite small—a comparable survey by the U.S. Census Bureau surveys around 250,000 individuals—its results aren’t as reliable. But the RAND authors, Katherine Grace Carman and Christine Eibner, perform a useful service, because they break out how people of varying insurance statuses in 2013 fared in 2014. For example, of the 40.7 million people they consider to have been uninsured in 2013, RAND can break out the fraction of those who gained insurance via the exchanges, via Medicaid, via employer-sponsored insurance, et al.
RAND finds that, overall, 9.3 million more U.S. residents have health insurance in 2014 relative to 2013. That figure has a margin of error of 3.5 million. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that 8.2 million of that comes from growth in employer-sponsored insurance. Labor force participation has been steadily declining, especially among younger individuals, which would seemingly make this result unlikely. Other surveys from ADP and Aon Hewitt have found that employer-sponsored coverage among the young has been flat to down.” - RAND Comes Clean: Obamacare's Exchanges Enrolled Only 1.4 Million Previously Uninsured Individuals, Forbes, 04/09/2014
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/04/09/rand-comes-clean-obamacares-exchanges-enrolled-only-1-4-million-previously-uninsured-individuals/?partner=yahootix
A political talking point by many advocates of ObamaCare is that certain provisions of the legislation are popular. One area routinely pointed to is the provision regarding expansion of coverage of young adults allowed them to stay on their parents health insurance policy until age 26.
However, the actual percentage of uninsured within the age group 18-25 has only changed from 27.6% in January 2008 to 24.5% in January 2012.
Albeit an improvement in the realm of uninsured, its worth one’s attention that the uninsured percentage of 18 - 25 age group has reached a plateau. The percentage uninsured has held constant in the area of 24% since the first quarter of 2011. That is, if the provision of the ObamaCare is popular, its popularity would supposedly plateau as well.
Therefore, the political capital of the political talking point, the provision regarding expansion of coverage of young adults allowed to stay on their parents health insurance policy until age 26, has likely reached its zenith. (1)
Notes:
(1) In U.S., Uninsured Rate for 18- to 25-Year-Olds Plateaus, The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, 04/03/2012
http://www.gallup.com/poll/153737/Uninsured-Rate-Year-Olds-Plateaus.aspx
