So, somebody tell me: I make about 10,000 a year. Will I have to forfeit my little $100-200 tax refund if I don’t buy insurance?
At 10K a year, you would be covered by Medicaid for free, if you are lucky enough to live in a state that expanded it, and, if not, would almost certainly fall under the “hardship” exemption to the mandate. If purchasing health insurance would cost too-large a fraction of your income, you aren’t required to purchase it.
Are you single? Married? Kids?
Single, no dependents, California.
I would bet that you will qualify for one of the free insurance plans under Medi-Cal. I doubt that will affect your tax return at all.
Before the ACA, individual insurance for me would have been close to unaffordable, despite my good income and excellent health ( no pre-existing conditions ).
My company pays about $500 a month for my insurance. If I had to buy the same policy from the same company as an individual, pre-ACA, the premiums would’ve been somewhere on the order of $1800 a month. If I had been looking to insure a family of 4, the pre- ACA cost for this policy would’ve been over 62K a year and this is not a typo.
Now, with ACA, in NY state, I can buy an equivalent individual policy for around $400 a month… and around $1200 a month for a family of 4.
When doing the math on “whether I can afford to quit my job and strike out on my own” …these numbers obviously become a huge deciding factor.