
The Congressional Budget Office released its score of the Senate health bill yesterday, and as I read it, I kept thinking back to a comment we received earlier this year, from a reader named Dave.
In March of 2016, Dave lost his job and with it his health coverage; he later found another much lower paying job without benefits (“hey I’m 63, glad to be working at all,” he writes); he bought coverage through the marketplace, where he says that Obamacare’s advanced tax credits “reduced my monthly premiums substantially.”So at first this sounded like was an “Obamacare is working great” story. However, when he did his 2016 taxes, it looked like an end-of-year bonus would push his total income above the cutoff to qualify for the ACA’s tax credits and he’d have to pay them all back. Understandably, he wasn’t happy:
This arbitrary number seems crazy, you go 1 dollar over it and owe thousands back to the IRS. Instead of some kind of sliding scale where if you go above certain limits you start losing the advanced credits but not owe a huge chunk for exceeding by a few dollars. The idiots that wrote and approved this plan, our representatives, OBVIOUSLY didn’t consider the poor schlub middle-class guy with a family of 4 paying 2 college tuition bills, food, mortgage and every other everyday bill, somehow cannot afford a 1700 health insurance bill while earning a certain amount, but go over that amount by a dollar and now he can afford it???, Frigging’ insanity, can’t wait for Trump and the Republican congress to replace this disastrous govt run nightmare.
Now, for most people, the Affordable Care Act does mean affordable premiums. The law’s tax credits lower premiums for people making less than 400% of the poverty line; and if you’re a younger person (i.e. under 40) making more than that, your premiums will still be affordable, because insurance companies charge young people less. But if you’re an older person and your income is too high to qualify for tax credits? You could end up paying more than 25% of your income for health insurance.
This is one of the Affordable Care Act’s biggest flaws, and Dave is right that Congress should fix it. But here’s the thing: the health plan that Trump and the Republican Congress are trying to pass would make things much, much worse. [continue reading…]