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Tag: Affordable Care Act

Obamacare Penalties Ahead for Many Tax Filers

Uncle Sam could take a bigger bite at tax time for consumers who received too much government help last year with their Obamacare premiums.

That may be just one of several surprises for millions of Americans in advance of the first tax deadline involving the Affordable Care Act.

The majority of Americans who get their health insurance at work should see few changes when filing their taxes. Most will just need to check a box on their tax return indicating they had coverage in 2014.

It stands to be more complicated for those individuals who purchased a private health plan in government-run exchanges or went without insurance at some point last year.

Obamacare launched a year ago, but it’s only now that people will incur tax penalties for being uninsured. Others will realize their federal premium subsidy was incorrect.

Experts project that 40% to 50% of families that qualified for financial assistance might have to repay some portion because their actual household income for 2014 was higher than what they estimated during enrollment.

Those repayments could range from a relatively small amount to thousands of dollars in some cases. In California, some of the first clues may emerge later this month when the state issues tax notices to 1 million consumers.

About 85% of the roughly 7 million Americans who signed up last year through government-run exchanges paid discounted premiums thanks to subsidies.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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Health-Law Suit Hints at Republican Divide

After President Obama’s Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, Republicans at both the state and federal levels seemed to speak with one voice in flatly rejecting it.

But in subsequent years, though most Republican governors remained critical of the health care law, nine accepted a central but optional element, expanding Medicaid programs to cover many more low-income residents of their states. At least four others, urged on by hospitals and business groups, will try to do so this year.

And now, briefs filed last month in support of a major legal challenge to the law — King v. Burwell, which is now before the Supreme Court — are raising new questions about divisions within the Republican Party over the law.

Such filings, known as amicus briefs, allow interested parties to weigh in on either side of a case. Nearly two dozen briefs were filed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the King case, which the court will hear on March 4, but relatively few Republican state officials signed on.

The case focuses on the federal subsidies that help Americans buy insurance through marketplaces established under the law. The plaintiffs say the law’s wording allows subsidies only in states that created their own marketplaces. But the Obama administration argues that Congress intended to make the subsidies, which are considered crucial to helping millions enroll in coverage, available in all states, including those that rely on the federally run marketplace.

Six Republican state attorneys general — in Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia — filed a brief agreeing that subsidies were illegal if distributed through the federal marketplace. “Those were the states that expressed an interest in joining,” said Aaron Cooper, a spokesman for Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, who led the effort.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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Obamacare is A Disaster: Here’s What ’60 Minutes’ Didn’t Tell You.

60 Minutes on Sunday ran an eye-raising exposé of the health law’s many shortcomings — or as correspondent Lesley Stahl called the segment, “What Obamacare Doesn’t Do.”

Unfortunately, when it came to telling a complete story about the Affordable Care Act, there was a lot that 60 Minutes itself didn’t do.

That’s too bad, because the incredibly popular and venerable news magazine is a force for steering national conversation. And 60 Minutes acknowledged that the ACA has accomplished some good, like help 10 million uninsured Americans get access to care.

Here were six of my biggest sticking points with 60 Minutes — and an argument for how they could’ve presented them instead.

Too many issues, not enough time made for muddled storytelling.

Rather than dwell on positives like the nation’s historically low uninsured rate, 60 Minutes made the decision to focus on one author who thinks that Obamacare is an “outrage”: Steven Brill, a lawyer who’s written a book called “America’s Bitter Pill,” which traces the creation of the Affordable Care Act.

That’s a fair decision, because Brill does have useful insights to offer. His well-written book attacks the perverse incentives in the U.S. health care system, and tries to figure out why prices are so darn high. And like experts who eagerly anticipated Sunday’s episode, I believe it’s always useful to shine a spotlight on health care’s inherent problems.

But the story that 60 Minutes chose to tell was misleading. The program didn’t offer context for Brill’s arguments, or touch on the ways that the Affordable Care Act is working. Just like Brill’s other interviews and articles, it again confused the important nuance of hospital charges versus hospital costs.

And Stahl jammed in so many other hot-button issues — from hospital executive compensation to how drug prices are negotiated and even why some American patients have to pay full “charges” — that her 13-minute segment was ultimately all over the place.

Read the full article here.

The Single-Payer Health Insurance Plan Fails in Vermont

For 25 years I’ve been saying that I wished a little state like Vermont would implement a single-payer Canadian-style health insurance system––”Medicare For All.” My argument has always been that such a small and limited experiment would give us the opportunity to see the ideological arguments for such a system play out in the face of fiscal reality and the stakeholders fighting it out in the political arena over who would get the money. The rest of the country would be able to learn a lot from it.

I have always thought that this debate will never be settled until a state gives it a shot and everybody witnesses the result.

So, I was excited to see that Vermont, of all places, was indeed going to give it a shot when they passed Act 48 back in 2011. It was no longer a theory, a state was really going to do it––”Medicare For All.”

Until last month.

Turns out reality crashed head-on with ideology a lot quicker than even I expected it to.

Vermont’s governor pulled the plug on his plan because the state couldn’t afford it.

Read the full article here.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?

“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”

In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” in the form of the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.

Read the full article http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/us/health-care-fixes-backed-by-harvards-experts-now-roil-its-faculty.html.

Contact Steven G. Cosby, MHSA with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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