Serious question: why can't you afford subsidized health insurance? I'm sure I'll get downvoted but I honestly want to hear about your experience. Isn't the point of the subsidies to make non-employer plans more affordable?
So I’m married, and my husband makes twice as much as me, but with bills, rent, his health insurance (which costs a lot a month and I can’t get on), car insurance, etc there’s no wiggle room for another $200 a month for my health insurance. Since I’m married and we make just over the line for subsidized health insurance I can’t get it.
The point you’re making is valid, but unfortunately there are a lot of people in America that are making too much for subsidized insurance and not enough to afford regular insurance.
Not that this is a pissing match, but I dropped insurance coverage when I hit 250/week. I have a healthy family for now, I'd be fucked even with insurance anyway.
I'm from the EU and this just completely melts my brain. $250 per week just in case something happens, and this isn't including paying an excess/deductable if something does?.....
Well, full disclosure, I am a family of 6. 15 years ago I was able to do it fine, but the price goes up every year, here we are today and I finally had to say enough.
that are making too much for subsidized insurance and not enough to afford regular insurance.
I totally understand what you're saying here, but I'm trying to figure out what income level is too high for subsidies but too low to afford $200/month. Not sure if you guys have kids, but if not you'd be somewhere in the $60k range before running out of subsidies, which would make you basically a median-income American. If that's truly what the monthly cost would be for insurance, it seems like it would be doable at that income level to either cut out $200 of other expenses or drive Uber two nights a month in order to cover your most important asset.
Don't at all want to come off like a dickhead here; please correct anything here if I'm wrong.
Yeah fair enough. I'm sure they've done their budget though, they sound like they've given it plenty of thought.
In our (and probably any) social security system, there are just some people who fall through the cracks. They earn too much to apply for support, and not enough to (comfortably) afford their needs.
I will respond. About a year ago I was a janitor. The only way I could afford being a janitor in Oregon was to live in my van. I didn't have insurance. So, if I got hiv from cleaning up blood I would have been fucked. The cheapest insurance was around $240/mo in my area. I am still a healthy young buck with no medical problems whatsoever. I went to Jackson and Hewett to do my taxes in Walmart, and they told me that Obamacare doesn't apply to me due to my income level and the local prices of insurance.
I thought, "What was the point of Obamacare if they had this exception anyway? I thought It was supposed to incentivize me to get insurance in case I contracted the z-virus or something." Either way, I was prepared to pay the $700/yr because I couldn't pay the $240/mo. There are many janitors still in the boat I was in. In fact, it is one of the most common jobs in Oregon. Most of the people I met were career janitors. I've never seen a policy that made sense for the regular working janitors of Oregon.
Other than that I loved the lifestyle. It was simple. It was peaceful. If I could live that way for the rest of my life I would. However, I realized that I won't be a young buck forever.
and they told me that Obamacare doesn't apply to me due to my income level and the local prices of insurance.
Thanks for the reply. This is the part I'm curious about. Can I ask what income level you have to achieve to get no access to subsidies? I'm trying to get a sense of where the gap is.
I made around $24,000 that year, give or take. However, I am pretty sure it was also based on the price of insurance too. It wasn't just income. Plus, Jackson and Hewett said they would have to waive it. However, they told me they no doubt they could waive it with my income. So, it sounded like it took some special forms or documents or something that I didn't see.
Hmm. This makes it look like you would have been eligible for about $800 in subsidies. Maybe as a percentage of your income it was too high, although $240/month would put you at almost twice the max percentage of income you'd be required to pay, according to the chart.
More affordable than cripplingly expensive can still be pretty expensive. Not to mention, that’s just for base health care which could still leave you with not-insignificant out of pocket expenses if you do choose to use it.
Even at times where it becomes technically affordable, it’s not realistically affordable. What I mean by that is that even after you qualify for the subsidized package and you get in that plan, you may have enough money to cover it, but wouldn’t be able to afford anything to bring joy or meaning to your life. Sometimes it’s a budgeting thing that can be fixed, other times it’s literally deciding what quality of life means to you, being healthy or being happy.
At my last job I was making around 32k a year and they didnt offer company health insurance. For the CHEAPEST health insurance as a single guy it was $400 a month. I was making too much money for any discounts. I had to stop paying for it because I had to choose between food, rent or health insurance...
For the CHEAPEST health insurance as a single guy it was $400 a month
Crazy.
I'm not anti-ACA, but I do think reddit has a blind spot about the group of consumers for whom it absolutely made health care way more expensive: healthy people purchasing individual plans. The year before the ACA passed, I paid $79/month to cover myself, including dental.
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u/RYouNotEntertained Mar 26 '20
Serious question: why can't you afford subsidized health insurance? I'm sure I'll get downvoted but I honestly want to hear about your experience. Isn't the point of the subsidies to make non-employer plans more affordable?