Short-Term Health Insurance / Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)?

fgmom wrote:

I have been researching this as well.

You say that both of you have quit your jobs.  If that is so, then your "official" income would most certainly be at or below poverty level?  If that is the case, you may qualify for the plan with the $12,000 deductible for free.  And that would at least satisfy them in the short-term.

I am NOT an expert, but when I was looking around the government website that runs the insurance programs, you are allowed to estimate your income for the upcoming year.  If you end up being way off, you would just have to compensate for the difference when you file taxes for the year.

Although the open enrollment period is over, a change of life circumstances, like quitting a job, allows you to enroll mid-year.

[Note to posters: If you use the QUOTE button when replying then it includes the post so people know who you are referring to. In this case I figured it out by reviewing the thread, fairly quickly.]

I know quite a bit about Obamacare and I believe you are correct in what you say above.

Anyway, yeah, if you make, say, only $24k a year for a married couple, then your Obamacare policy should be truly "affordable care". Once you get up around $50k it's not so affordable imho.

And yes, if you lose your job for example, you can quit your health policy and apply for an adjustment to your subsidy and you might get put on something like Medi-Cal if you live in California for example, which is free or very cheap care.

Here in CA the problem with applying for Obamacare if you have several part time jobs, is they do not allow you to enter your part time income, they ask how much you make at each job per week or month, then their software automatically multiplies it times 12 or 52, so it is totally screwy if you have several part time incomes or for example, incomes from several web sites.

Also estimating your next year's income is a real problem in these cases as it can change willy-nilly. You can easily lose a part time job or your independent contractor or independent business income can change from one month to the next. The problem then is this, for example: (these figures are not 100% accurate and it also varies from state to state as to where the cut-off point is for getting a subsidy for your Obamacare policy)

Let's say your projected income next year is $59k for you and your wife. Okay, so you sign up with Obamacare and you get a $450/month Silver policy and the government gives you a $480/month subsidy based on your reported income of $59k. So then you get your policy and when tax time comes next year you realize you made $62k which is slightly OVER the cut-off point for getting that $480 a month subsidy.

So then you get charged for that $480 x 12 months subsidy! (as I understand it - because you didn't really qualify for it though you thought you would). So you end up with a nearly $6,000 debt to the government for that year and in effect paid $930/month for your crappy Silver Obamacare policy instead of $450/month.

It works in reverse as well, so if you thought you were going to make $60k but in reality only ended up making $40k then you are supposed to get the difference back, between what you paid for month for the policy based on $60k a year vs what you would have paid if you'd applied based on a $40k/year income.

However that difference is not as great as in my example above, because the cut off point for subsidy is a cliff, not a hill. That is, over a certain amount the subsidy just disappears, it does not begin to become lower. The subsidy goes slightly lower bit by bit, as your income goes up, until you reach the cut off point. Then it just goes away completely.

So if the cut off is $60k for a couple to get a $490/month subsidy and they end up making $60,001 ($1 dollar over the cut off point) they would not get LESS subsidy, they would go from getting, say, a $489/month subsidy to getting $0 subsidy just because of that $1 dollar over.