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Mine went from a little over $500 mo. including dental and vision with no deductible for dr. visits and only $200 deductible for testing with $2,000 max to $770 mo. NO vision, NO dental $1,600 deductible and $5,000 max. With the high deductible and increased premium, my health insurance has doubled in three years.
If your employer has Flex Med Spending account as a benefit, take it to the max, save at least 25% of your cost.
Your problem is that you make too much taxable income.
That puts you out of the reach of any subsidy.
You need to get smarter about that and find ways to reduce your taxable income.
Your taxable income will also come back to bite you when you retire and sign up for SS and medicare as that now affects your medicare premiums and could make a port of your SS check taxable.
What will this do to our economy if people are thinking of ways to make less money?
The middle class, those somewhere in the middle may find themselves with 3 choices.
1) Pay a whole boatload more than they've ever paid before for healthcare.
2) pay a penalty and do without.
3) Make under a certain amount to get it free or subsidized.
This third choice bothers me. Choosing not to function at your full potential is choosing mediocrity. I think in the long run its bad for the country.
We're plenty smart about about "reducing our taxable income" but we can't reduce it to the level that we would qualify for subsidies (that someone else's tax dollars are paying) unless we voluntarily make significantly less money. And how would that benefit us or the economy?
We're not going to intentionally be less successful just to qualify for more "freebies" and government benefits. Sheeze!
My point though is not that we can't afford to pay our premiums. We can. We could also "afford" to buy a house that's twice as big and twice as expensive as the one we live in now. We can "afford" to buy a new car every year if we want to, rather than driving older cars or buying used cars when we do buy. But that doesn't mean those expenses would be a smart use of our money.
We work hard for our money and for our success - we didn't inherit any of this and neither of us come from wealthy families at all. We come from generations of hard workers and many small business owners, who believed in working hard in order to provide the better things in life for their families. Why should we scale back on that intentionally, just to qualify for subsidies?????
By the way, I realize that you're talking about tax shelters and write offs. We already take the legal deductions, and contribute to tax deferred retirement accounts, that sort of thing. We're the ones who are "stuck" - that small business owner, upper middle class sort of people you hear about getting taxed and expensed to death - well, that's us. IN SPITE OF all the business tax deductions and individual deductions and tax deferred savings, etc, we still pay 33 percent of our income in taxes. AND THEN we pay our health insurance premiums, which are more than our mortgage.
DAY-um, as they say here in Texas.
And I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for us - sympathy is in short supply for anyone who's making a decent living. We're upper middle class now (NOT the wealthy by the way), but we both did our time roughing it. So I know what it's like to be poor, and to be well off.
But whether we get any sympathy from anyone or not, it makes me plenty mad to be taken advantage of. Why should we pay a higher percentage of our taxes than the Obama family" (Obama paid 20 percent in taxes this past year.) Why should we pay a higher percentage than GE, which paid 5 percent in taxes? See, we're well off enough that the government (and insurance companies and creditors, you name it) know that we'll pay our bills, but we're not rich enough to work the system to our advantage like so many of the ultra wealthy do.
Warren Buffet is what..a millionaire or billionaire ?
His taxable income is only $100K a year.
Did I ever say once.."make less money" ?
No, I said you need to get smarter about your income.
I can't tell you why your situation got worse, if it really did. I can only tell you that your case is very unusual. Even among most people who think Obamacare shafted them, it's actually helped them and they're just confused (it's an unfortunately complicated system). That's why I'd prefer a simple public health system, but ACA still helped millions of Americans anyway.
What I don't understand is why the people most vocal about the ACA's problems are most insistent on making those problems worse. High premiums, so we should remove all the ACA regulations capping premiums. Get screwed by networks, let's strip back regulations even more. My crap isn't covered, let's go back to letting insurance companies drop you for getting sick. I have a wound, let's rub some rusty nails in it. Conservatives just never stop being loudly wrong.
It's not unusual at all. It's very typical for those who are self insured. It's insulting that you think that people who have had this experience must be stupid or in your words, "confused". Really? The people who are the most vocal are the people who have been shafted. I'd love to just have insurance only for the big stuff and pay cash for everything else. It would make that insurance a lot more affordable and in line with it's original intent.
No actually, we determined it helps more people than it hurts with something called math.
Nobody who was buying individual insurance pre-ACA had real insurance. Nobody. If the company can drop you for getting sick, you aren't really insured. The fact is that you were probably helped by the ACA, you're just too partisan to accept it.
What will this do to our economy if people are thinking of ways to make less money?
The middle class, those somewhere in the middle may find themselves with 3 choices.
1) Pay a whole boatload more than they've ever paid before for healthcare.
2) pay a penalty and do without.
3) Make under a certain amount to get it free or subsidized.
This third choice bothers me. Choosing not to function at your full potential is choosing mediocrity. I think in the long run its bad for the country.
It has absolutely NOTHING to do with cheating the system.
Obamacare subsidies are your own tax credits..you are not taking any taxpayer money.
They are credits against your future income.
Did you think these premium subsidies were coming out of the General Fund or something ?
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