Health Insurance & Taxes
Sneak peak of my submission to the Alliance for Lifetime Income
Health Insurance Is A Tax
Handled correctly, people can retire early. Handled poorly, a surprise tax bill of more than $10,000 can await you. I have witnessed this, every single year.
It’s a central idea to understanding financial anything. Just follow the cash flow. Under the Affordable Care Act, if you make more money, you pay higher premiums. Period.
Under Medicare, the same idea exists, but with a different structure.
Once you understand this, then you can move forward, with the selection of the most suitable plan. The selection of which plan is complicated. Depending on your health situation, the suitable solution for you can be found, the number of choices is dizzying, more than 100 plans can be found in many counties throughout the USA.
I discuss the cost of these taxes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, the Advance Premium Tax Credit can lower your tax (health insurance cost) dramatically.
By The Way
Here’s what I didn’t say….
I didn’t say that the government doesn’t have the right to tax. It does. SCOTUS wrote it very clearly, I was stunned that the opinion was this accurate, in its opinion.
Did POTUS advertise the ACA as a tax? He is smarter than any of that: it would’ve failed, people detest taxes.
This is what happens when people confuse health insurance with healthcare.
Who doesn’t make this mistake? Humana doesn’t, I promise you. They do not care about your politics or philosophy, nor should they. Its job is to have the calculated estimates (i.e. the premium and benefits) correct. Put it this way, there is no place on any insurance application that asks you what your political affiliation is.
More than a decade later, still zero workable alternatives have been proposed. Not one. That should tell you that the underlying system is brutally complicated. Can you fix this? Sure. You would have to strip everything down and start over, taxes, education, and philosophy of the government’s role in your everyday life. And it would need to be voted on and agreed. Ah, that.
Instead, how about we focus on getting the most with the system that exists?
A draft of my article, to be sent out as a research note to the Alliance for Lifetime Income (I am an education fellow), can be read here. Please feel free to ask questions!