This is huge. Bigger than anything I wrote about up until now.
http://healthblog.ncpa.org/obamacares-biggest-wrong-collecting-the-premiums/
The people needing individual coverage who don’t have coverage today tend to be the types of people most likely to end up unable to pay their premiums… This would be especially true if they start having health problems and lose their income.
So what happens if a person signs up for an ACA compliant policy (to comply with the law) and then doesn’t pay their portion of the subsidized premium?
When the person is 30 days late, the insurer will have to tell HHS. At that point, the insurance company can warn providers the patient is delinquent and if they continue to treat the patient, they risk not getting paid.
Once the person is 90 days late, the policy is cancelled and person will not be able to get a new policy until January 1st. They lose the tax credit for the months they didn’t pay the premium.
As the author of the article above points out, the people writing these regulations have solid jobs with good health insurance – they don’t begin to understand how people “just getting by” actually live. Many are uninsured for a reason other than bad health.
Another thing I just picked up on was that to qualify for the premium subsidy, you have to have filed a tax return the prior year. People living in the cash economy working off the books are about to become trapped. That’s not a bad thing, but those may be the people who will become violent. Compliance with income tax laws varies widely, with the government looking the other way among some ethnic groups.
Here is an interesting study (albeit old)
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax-analysis/Documents/ota78.pdf
The author goes way out of his way to say “I’m not studying whether many black people don’t pay taxes”…
What he did was match Census data with IRS filing data to count how many people were in the census but didn’t file an income tax return. The final page has the stat that 29.5% of people expected to file a return who didn’t are black – which is more than double their portion of the population. Even that is based on compliance with filling out the census forms. It was a huge problem in Detroit (which is 90% black) that people who were not paying taxes refused to tell the Census department they exist, knowing that eventually the government might cross check records.
If you think that cuts to Social Security is the third rail of politics, any politician who even asks about non compliance rates by ethnic group is committing career suicide.
Interesting study. So, “to qualify for the premium subsidy, you have to have filed a tax return the prior year” and do you also need a checking account?
Question: will the IRS enforce compliance with the ACA through the filter of race and political view? Can the NSA capture and analyze digital voting records?
One of the odd (but not unexpected) questions during the healthcare.gov sign up process was it did want to know if I consider myself Hispanic and what racial group I belong to.
Could you answer that you were an individualist and not a member of any groups?
“I do not want to join any group that would have me as a Member”
I seem to also remember signing a statement at the end that I understand inaccurate answers were a crime.
Remember it forced me do all of this BEFORE it got me to the point where it would (in theory) give me comparative price quotes.
If I went to Blue Cross directly and ask for a quote, surprisingly it didn’t ask my race as I’m pretty sure that would create a presumption of racial discrimination.
Isn’t race a pre-existing condition?
Either that or a religious belief.
There would be credence to that. 😉
This is the very topic I posted about last week; what will the IRS do to someone who can not pay their health insurance premium in the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th months? So many people are already in financial trouble due to the poor, weak job market. It matters very little if you start out with a 50% to 75% subsidy because if you fail to pay the monthly premium the subsidy is then cancelled and you will be required to pay back the subsidized amount.
What happens if you have coverage, pay the whole premium but can not pay the $5,000 deductible? What sort of “help” is available from the federal government?
Better to avoid buying the insurance and pay the fine IF you have some reason to believe you could lose your job, or go to under 30 hours, or do not have enough money to pay the premium plus any deductible.