posted March 21, 2015 09:13 AM            

Many Americans without health insurance will have to pay a penalty when filing taxes with the Internal Revenue Service in Washington.

Stephanie Armour
March 20, 2015

WASHINGTON—A special enrollment period to obtain health insurance for millions of uninsured people who owe a tax penalty under the Affordable Care Act is off to a slow start.

The health law requires most Americans to have insurance or pay a fine at tax time. The open enrollment period under the health law ended Feb. 15, but the Obama administration said it would allow people who discover they owe a fine to sign up for coverage through April, at the end of the tax season.

Major tax-preparation firms say many customers are paying the penalty and not getting health insurance. It is still early, since the special enrollment period launched Sunday, but research also suggests that many people who lack health insurance will pay the penalty and not get covered this year.

Only 12% of uninsured people would buy policies if informed of the penalty, according to a survey of 3,000 adults polled through Feb. 24 by McKinsey & Co.’s Center for U.S. Health System Reform.

At H&R Block Inc., “our analysis indicates that a significant percentage of taxpayers whose household members were not covered for at least a portion of 2014 are opting” to pay the penalty, said Mark Ciaramitaro, a vice president of health-care enrollment services at the tax-preparation firm.

Richard Gonzalez, 59 years old, of Navarre, Fla., found out he will pay a $250 penalty for going without insurance. The retired employee of United Parcel Service Inc. said he won’t take advantage of the special enrollment period because it is cheaper for him to pay out-of-pocket for health care than to buy insurance on the exchange. He said he shopped on the exchange but would have to pay $400 a month for a plan with a $6,000 deductible.

“I think it’s wrong I have to pay the penalty,” said Mr. Gonzalez. “But it beats paying more than $10,000 a year.”

The tax season has faced other hiccups related to the ACA. The Obama administration sent about 820,000 people incorrect tax statements—known as 1095-A forms—about their health coverage in 2014, causing many to taxpayers to have to wait to file their returns.

Federal officials said on a Friday press call that about 740,000 corrected forms have been mailed out or can be downloaded from the HealthCare.gov site. About 80,000 corrected forms will be mailed and available online next week, they said.

Consumers who already filed their tax returns using the incorrect forms provided though state or federal exchanges won’t be required to file amended forms, and the Internal Revenue Service won’t assess additional taxes, said Mark Mazur, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy.

The Obama administration may re-evaluate filing extensions because of the incorrect forms, but at this time, April 15 is the end of tax-filing season based on statute, officials said.

Lackluster sign-ups during the special period mean the Obama administration may only get a small enrollment boost. About 11.7 million people have already signed up on state and federal exchanges this year, though not all of them have yet paid premiums.

While federal officials have said that as many as six million households may owe a penalty for not having insurance, they haven’t said how many people they expect to sign up for coverage during the special enrollment period. Still, the administration has been eager to increase sign-ups, especially for key demographics such as healthy young adults and minorities who have high uninsured rates.

“It was a good PR move and aligns enrollment with tax season, but we’re not seeing a massive rush,” said Mark Steber, a spokesman with Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. “It’s been pretty unremarkable.”

The special enrollment period applies to people who have to pay a penalty for going without coverage in 2014 and also face a penalty in 2015. They must pay any penalty they owe for not having coverage but can use the special enrollment period to obtain coverage and not generate any more fines.

Those who were uninsured in 2014 face penalties of $95, or 1% of their income—whichever is higher—when they file taxes this year. Fines will grow to $325, or 2% of income, for 2015, though millions of people qualify for exemptions.

Those with insurance through the exchanges might find another unpleasant surprise: As many as half the nearly 7 million Americans who got subsidies to offset their premiums may have to refund money to the government, according to an estimate by H&R Block. The subsidies are based on consumers’ own projections of their 2014 income, but some estimated incorrectly and received overly generous credits. Those people will see smaller-than-expected refunds or could owe the government money.

Tax experts say the problem will persist because the subsidy system is still based on consumers’ own—and often inaccurate—income projections. Many of the people enrolled for coverage in 2015 include customers who were automatically renewed by the federal government, which means their subsidies could be inaccurate if they didn’t update their income.

posted March 21, 2015 03:07 PM            

And, if you did have O'BomberCare, you might have paid nearly $5,000 and still had a $6,000 deductible to pay before any real benefits were paid out on your behalf...per year!

posted March 23, 2015 11:13 AM            

Obamacare’s Amazing Wayback Clause
PPACA decreased health care inflation even before implementation!
David Catron
3.23.15

Obamacare’s boosters have made so many implausible assertions about its supposed successes that it’s difficult to single out one as the most preposterous. But any list of their most comical claims would have to include those involving the law’s “wayback clause.” Haven’t heard of that one? Well, like the provision authorizing the IRS to issue subsidies via federal exchanges, it’s absent from PPACA’s text. Nonetheless, its efficacy is routinely touted by Obamacare’s proponents as proof that “reform” works.

The most celebrated effect of this amazing provision is its retroactive reduction of medical inflation during the years preceding the law’s implementation. Obamacare was passed in 2010. However, except for a few minor provisions, it didn’t go into effect until 2014. Yet the law’s wayback clause is such a powerful cost control tool that it has been able to traverse the time-space continuum and slow the rate of health care inflation, as the President himself has phrased it, “every single year since the law passed.”

The wondrous workings of the wayback clause have also been heralded by congressional Democrats. Wisconsin Rep. Gwen Moore, for example, told a radio interviewer the following: “We’ve had the lowest health care inflation in history because of Obamacare.” And the President’s advisors have, of course, chimed in. The Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to credit the “largely unheralded slowdown in health spending” to Obamacare.

It goes without saying that such marvels have been the subject of many “news” articles and countless opinion pieces. A typical example of the latter is this column in the New York Daily News by Bill Hammond, who parrots the party line and issues the following snide challenge: “So who will be the first major Republican to admit that Obamacare is working? Who among the GOP’s brain trust is intellectually honest enough, or brave enough, to follow the developing facts instead of talking points and opinion polls?”

But if Hammond wants anyone to admit that Obamacare is working based on the decline of health care inflation, he will have to explain why that trend began eight years before the law was passed. As the New York Times reports, “The slowdown in spending growth began in 2002.” Does Hammond actually believe Obamacare’s wayback clause was able to transcend the laws of physics as well as economics, that it was able to reach all the way back to the Bush era and halt what he calls the “ruinous spiral of spending”?

Hammond would be loath to say so, of course, but it is possible to be honestly skeptical about the claims he and others make concerning the law’s successes, particularly in the area of costs. Nonpartisan studies attribute the decline in health care inflation to economic factors, insisting that the recession was the most important factor in reducing growth in medical spending: “This suggests that the recent decline is not primarily the result of structural changes in the health sector or of components of the Affordable Care Act.”

Some have even suggested that considerable credit for the slowdown in health care inflation—you Obamacare advocates should sit down before reading further—must go to the policies of George W. Bush. Much of the decline has been driven, these researchers point out, by a “remarkable” slowdown in Medicare spending, particularly in the Part D prescription drug program. Specifically, they write, “Our analysis shows that Part D has accounted for over 60 percent of the slowdown in Medicare benefits since 2011.”

For those naïve enough to claim that this is a benefit of Obamacare’s closure of the much maligned “donut hole,” the reality is that this puts upward pressure on medical spending. Which brings us to the kind of inflationary pressures that our health care system will face because of PPACA. Beginning in 2014, the law increased demand on our health care system while doing nothing to increase the supply of medical services. This is by definition inflationary. And there are already signs that this is having the predictable effect.

Bloomberg reports that federal data suggest the party is already over: “The nation’s nearly $3 trillion medical bill grew 5 percent last year, compared with an average annual rate of 3.9 percent from 2009 to 2013.” And it gets worse. It appears that the 2014 acceleration in medical inflation might just be the beginning: “The data confirm earlier estimates by Altarum economists, which might be a sign that costs will accelerate in 2015.” In other words, Obamacare has probably ended the 12-year downward trend in health care inflation.

posted March 24, 2015 12:47 PM            

For Many Americans, Obamacare's Damage Turns Personal
Tuesday, 24 Mar 2015
Joel Himelfarb

Five years after it was enacted, Obamacare remains decidedly unpopular with most Americans. According to Real Clear Politics, the average of major public opinion polls has 52.5 percent opposing the law and only 42 percent favoring it. The 10.5 percent margin of opposition is identical to what it was when President Barack Obama signed it into law in March 2010.

Obama boasts about the increased number of Americans who now have health insurance as a result of the measure. But, according to Galen Institute President Grace Marie Turner, the progress made in this area has been relatively small, and it has come at a staggeringly high cost.

A year before Obamacare was enacted, the uninsured rate among U.S. adults was 14.4 percent. In the fourth quarter of last year, it was 12.9 percent.

"So our health sector has been thrown into turmoil, millions of people have lost their private health plans, $1 trillion in new and higher taxes have been imposed on individuals and businesses — and the uninsured rate has dropped a net of 1.5%," Turner writes at Forbes.com.

Most of those newly insured as a result of Obamacare have been enrolled in Medicaid, an entitlement program that is in ruinous fiscal condition and has been devouring state budgets even though it generally pays hospitals and doctors less than any other health plan.

"Adding millions more able-bodied adults to Medicaid makes it even harder for the poorest, most vulnerable Americans to find a physician to see them," according to Turner.

"We can do better than this."

In focus-group meetings organized by the Galen Institute, it becomes clear why Obamacare is unpopular with most Americans. "Most wanted to cover the uninsured, but the law's huge overreach means they are feeling for themselves the law's impact," Turner writes. "ObamaCare has become personal."

While on the campaign trail in 2008, Obama promised Americans a $2,500 decrease in insurance premiums by 2012. In reality, they increased more than $3,000.

The average individual deductible for an Obamacare bronze plan in 2015 is $5,081 a year — "42 percent higher than the average $3,589 deductible for a comparable individually purchased plan," Turner writes.

In addition, millions of Americans "have lost the doctors and health plans they valued, many are being forced to pay penalties for not buying ObamaCare's expensive mandated insurance, others are finding they must pay back subsidies they received last year, and compliance is a bureaucratic nightmare for individuals, small businesses, and physicians," she notes.

Moreover, workers have lost jobs and hours because businesses couldn't afford to provide all of the program's mandated benefits or cough up thousands of dollars in penalties.

But even so, companies are required to monitor the number of hours worked by each of their employees to determine whether they reach the 30-hour-a-week threshold defined as a "full-time" job under Obamacare.

Businesses are also required to track and report to the government the months that an employee is covered by insurance and the cost of the premiums so officials can determine whether the coverage should be deemed "affordable" under the law.

Time spent meeting these bureaucratic reporting requirements is time diverted from improving the goods and services a company produces or adding to the firm's value.

But as flawed and unpopular as the law has proven to be, things would likely be much worse if substantial changes had not been made repealing or delaying some of its most onerous provisions.

The Galen Institute calculates that Obamacare has been altered "at least" 49 times since it was enacted March 23, 2010, with two of the changes resulting from Supreme Court-instituted modifications, 17 more through changes approved by Congress and signed into law by the president, and 30 instituted by the Obama administration without statutory authority.

posted March 24, 2015 02:31 PM            

Which is supposed to be $ 95 or 1% of your income, isnt it? Going up but not yet. H&R Block tend to err in favour of the IRS..

posted March 24, 2015 05:06 PM            

quote:

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Most of those newly insured as a result of Obamacare have been enrolled in Medicaid, an entitlement program that is in ruinous fiscal condition and has been devouring state budgets even though it generally pays hospitals and doctors less than any other health plan.

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posted April 09, 2015 11:19 AM            

Without O'BomberCare, why would my insurance rates go up? It's those with O'BomberCare and private insurance governed by O'Bomber's mandated coverages who's rates have gone up...dramatically.

The hot steaming mess of O'BomberCare has created chaos in insurance markets and made clear to Americans that O'Bomber and his Socialist comrades in Congress don't give a rat's ass what Americans think about presidential and congressional mismanagement and lawlessness.

posted April 10, 2015 06:48 AM            

Monday was the fifth anniversary of Obamacare. Seven Democratic senators marked it by asking to delay yet another provision of the law.

Putting companies with 51 to 100 employees in the costlier “small group” market could be “harmful and disruptive,” they said in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Silvia Burwell.

Please give the uninsured another chance to avoid the fine for not having health insurance, three House Democrats asked in a letter to President Barack Obama in February.

“If Obamacare is so great, why do Democrats repeatedly try to hide its more unpleasant features?” Investors Business Daily asked them.

Before the law was passed, President Obama assured us:

If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. (Tens of thousands — chiefly seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage — have learned they can’t. Only 32 percent of 3,072 physicians surveyed by medical HR firm Jackson Coker say they’ll join the Obamacare network.)

If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. (Hundreds of thousands/(millions) — most recently in Colorado — have had their plans canceled. Up to 20 million eventually might, the Congressional Budget Office once estimated.)

Premiums for the average family will be cut by up to $2,500. (Premiums in the non-group marketplace were 24.4 percent higher last year than they would have been absent Obamacare, said the National Bureau of Economic Research.)

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits,” the president said. (Obamacare will raise net federal costs by $1.35 trillion over the next decade, CBO estimated in January.)

“This law means more choice, more competition,” he said. (The year before Obamacare went into effect, 1,232 carriers offered insurance coverage in the individual market, said the Government Accountability Office. This year, owing in part to market concentration, only 310 do.)

No wonder the law’s defenders strive frantically to move the goalposts. Obamacare is a success because more people have health insurance, they say. You have to pay a fine if you don’t have insurance, so this “accomplishment” is pretty lame — especially since so many uninsured pay the fine rather than buy overpriced insurance.

Many of the 11.4 million Obamacare “signups” of which the administration boasts previously had health insurance. Only 6.7 million of the 8 million “signups” claimed for last year actually enrolled.

CBO predicted when Obamacare was passed that this year 26 million more Americans would have health insurance. This month, CBO scaled that estimate back by more than 10 million, though one reason is that 23 states chose not to expand Medicaid.

Premiums will rise about 8.5 percent this year and next, CBO estimates. In the two years before Obamacare was enacted, premiums rose just 0.6 percent and 1.3 percent.

Obamacare’s true cost is disguised by subsidies for insurance companies due to expire in 2017, writes Stephen Parente, professor of health finance at the University of Minnesota. When they do, premiums for “Bronze” plans will soar as much as 45 percent.

Obamacare clobbers employment, say businesses surveyed by Federal Reserve banks in New York and Philadelphia. When the oft-delayed employer mandate finally kicks in, thousands more will lose their jobs.

Obamacare has been underwater in 200 consecutive polls, by larger margins since implementation began. As more Americans discover their “inexpensive” policy has an enormous deductible or get a nasty surprise from the IRS, I wouldn’t bet on it becoming more popular.

Obamacare will cost some $50,000 for each additional person insured, according to some calculations. “There’s no way we can afford it,” said author Stephen Brill.

In a year or two, when premiums and fines soar, Obamacare will be in a “death spiral,” if it isn’t already in one.

posted April 11, 2015 01:09 PM            

Lets see..either you have no insurance and are planning on stonewalling the penalty

Or you have insurance you like that is not in compliance..and apparently hasn't gone up - anymore than usual

But youre still shrieking about the highway robbery/forced changes/ high price of the plan.

Are you on Medicare and supplemental? Are you happily paying more for your meds or are you unmedicated (like myself)?

posted May 13, 2015 12:20 PM            

One guy calculated that due to the difference in costs for, say, a hip replacement, he could fly to Spain for a new hip and even live there for a year (there is some aftercare involved) and still spend less than getting a new hip at home here in the USA.

posted May 13, 2015 12:26 PM            

So yes theres a lot wrong with the ACA but unless you are going to get rid of insurance companies or cap premiums (commie horrors!) the actual cost of healthcare is hard to contain.

posted May 13, 2015 12:40 PM            

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/04/coalition-attacks-nhs-return-britain-age-workhouse?

posted May 14, 2015 09:30 AM            

In the real world, people in other nations with a Socialist Health Care System, come to the United States for treatment....because medical treatment in the United States IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD.

On the issue of HEALTH INSURANCE:
Of those who had a private insurance policy...either individual or a group policy through their employer...85% WERE HAPPY WITH THEIR INSURANCE POLICY.

That means the Marxist Messiah and his Socialist comrades in Congress overthrew private insurance by lying through their leftist teeth and created the "Hot Steaming Mess" that IS O'BomberCare that Americans despise.

Americans responded by kicking their sorry as$es out of their House and Senate seats.

When O'Bomber and his Socialist comrades were lying to America about O'BomberCare, demoscats controlled both Houses of Congress. After passing O'BomberCare...so we could find out what's in it...demoscats don't control either the House of Representatives OR the US Senate.

posted May 14, 2015 03:12 PM            

We don't see people pulling their own teeth here because they can't get on the dentist's waiting list for treatment.

We don't see people here strapped to gurneys and deprived of food and water because some Socialist bureaucrat decided they would be better off dead.