Obamacare Penalties for No Insurance Getting Worse

obamacare
Reuters

According to H&R Block, uninsured filers are paying more than double what they paid last year for penalties incurred for lacking health insurance, as per Obamacare.

H&R Block estimated that its clients are anteing up an average of $383 this year, as opposed to $172 one year ago. The increase in costs derives from the penalty estimated on $325 or 2 percent of income, whichever is greater, far more than the $95 or 1 percent of qualified income of 2014.

According to healthcare.gov, you owe the fee for any month you, your spouse, or your tax dependents don’t have health insurance that qualifies as minimum essential coverage.” The fee for not having health insurance in 2016 is $695 per adult, and $347.50 per child under 18, with a maximum of $2,085.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that seven million people qualify for a subsidy, while roughly half have incomes that are so low they qualify them for a zero-cost bronze plan. That plan has to cover at least 60 percent of the enrollee’s health care costs.

60% of H&R Block clients who received advanced tax credits in order to pay for private plans are reimbursing the IRS because they underestimated their actual income for 2015.

A problem arose for filers who received subsidies; they had to figure out how those subsidies worked with their actual income. The number of people repaying subsidies to the government rose from 52% last year to 60% this year, from an average of $530 last year to $579 this year.

Over one-third of those who claimed Obamacare tax credits over-estimated how much money they made; on average, they were reimbursed $450 from the government.

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