Unaffordable Coverage Option Story With Solutions

Obamacare is about to ruin my life. I now work 40 hours per week for an employer who has more than 50 full time employees, although many employees were cut back to 30 hours due to the ACA. I escaped that misery. But the law is still set to have a horrible impact on my life.

My employer offers insurance through BC/BS, and the individual payment would be 65 dollars per week. I make, gross, 370 dollars per week. I am left with much less after the mandated deductions.

In any case, there is no way on earth that I can afford the 65 dollars per week.

The ACA law agrees that this is unaffordable to me, as it is over 17 per cent of my income. Gross income.

But, I cannot be expected to apply for insurance via an Obamacare exchange.

Read this:

“Employers are subject to fines (“assessable payments”) if they do not offer affordable coverage to full time employees. But under the statute the payment is triggered only if at least one employee receives a subsidy.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/william-levin-the-road-to-obamacare-repeal.php

Wouldn’t it be lovely for both myself and my employer if I were the “at least one” employee to receive a subsidy (which I would, if I applied via an exchange….since the cheapest plan available to me in Michigan would cost about half my income).

I am not going to make that happen to either of us. Obviously.

My employer offers what the company can afford. His family’s corporation is not Wally World.

I must conclude that the purpose of the law is to ruin the lives of the working poor, such as myself…I need all 40 hours to make expenses.

In addition, it must aim to ruin relatively small, successful employers who can afford to hire more than 50 full-time workers, but who cannot afford to subsidize the the exhorbitant cost of insurance.

The fool in the White House said that people could afford insurance if they quit buying t.v. and internet service. Not so.

As it is, I am cold in my house all winter, keeping it only warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. Electric rates here are nearly the highest in the country. I do not have tv at all. I have a cell phone that costs 100 dollars per year, a “go phone”. There are no luxuries to cut, other than my land line phone (the cell phone does not always work in my house, sometimes I have to go outside to get a signal) and my dial-up internet access (which costs less than 150 dollars a year. Eliminating my land line would not allow me to afford insurance.

Buying insurance would ruin me.

Neither can I afford the fine, euphemistically called a “tax”.

I read that I cannot apply for an exemption from the fine, because affordability of insurance would be calculated assuming I use the subsidies provided by an exchange plan.

“The individual mandate penalty does not apply to those who cannot afford coverage. The implementing regulations apply the exemption if the annual cost of coverage exceeds 8% of household income. But in the calculation of cost, the tax subsidy is subtracted. As a result, millions who would have been exempt are forced to buy coverage.”

See above.

When one is f’d over by the government, one is truly f’d .

I’m sure you have some wise advice.

However…

Please skip: Work fewer hours. I work 40 because I need to.

Also, skip: Get another part-time job and then have your hours cut at your primary job, so your employer will not be fined when you go through an exchange.

How unfair is that to me? I like my job, and I get a paid vacation week every year (which does more for my health than any insurance would), which I’d lose if I did that. Also, from experience, juggling multiple jobs is stressful enough to impact my health. If the government weren’t making unreasonable demands, it would never be a consideration.

Also, skip:: Telling me that if my employer were to “retaliate” by reducing my hours because I bought insurance through an exchange, I could get help from the Fair Labor Relations Board, or some such. An Obamacare “navigator” actually told me that…I am not joking. The perspective is all wrong. First, I would do exactly that in his shoes, to protect my business, not as “retaliation”. That would be a necessary act of self-defense. My employer is not the adversary here.

That scenario is definitely a fantasy. Even if I were foolish enough to believe that it would remedy the hours problem, that is not the kind of hell that I would put either myself or my employer through.

Understand, if you can, my employer is not being irresponsible in not affording a less expensive coverage that I could afford to buy. It is simply not an affordable expense for the business. I have no trouble understanding that. One would have to be in government, playing with the earnings of other peoples’ labor to not understand.

That seems to leave me stuck with a huge fine for being too poor to buy insurance, left out of the exchange by a provision that would impact both my employer and myself in a very unfair and cruel manner, and denied even the right to point out that I can afford neither the insurance nor the fine, much less the loss of my full time status at work.

I need my money (earned by my honest and useful labor —not by investment in for-profit health industries or pharmaceutical corporations) for food, shelter, heat. The basic necessities. Glasses when I need new ones…Obamacare skips eye care.

How dare anyone argue that 1 per cent of a working poor person’s income is negligible. The impact is on the ability to afford basic necessities.

This law and what it means to do it me is in fact making me ill.

Literally. I am under attack.

I am a 60 year old single woman who must work to pay my bills. Now the government threatens me that if I do work my full week for an employer unable to afford to offer me “affordable” insurance, I am then subject to paying for merely being alive and responsible enough to work for a living, while unable to afford insurance. Or I could cheerfully stick my employer with a huge fine, and see how well that works out for us.

So, what is your wise advice?

The individual mandate, like the employer mandate, is wholly immoral. The state of my gall bladder has nothing to do with where I work or who employs me and how many other people are employed by the business I work for. Nothing. Tying national health care to employment by corporations, small businesses, etc., is itself a travesty of justice.

I’d be thrilled to have basic insurance in case I break an arm, but for that, costs would need to be held down, as in civilized nations.

But that is another subject.

Finally, I am under no illusion that this web site is the work of two impartial..strangely unidentified… “guys”, despite the description. It stinks of a very interested party with an agenda. Nevertheless, here you have it.

Sent to https://obamacarefacts.com/contact/ on January 6, 2015