the question hits close to home for me personally because I am one of those people 
Anyway, so what is the straight dope on young, healthy, low income, self-employed people in Massachusetts who want to optimize (as in, minimize at any cost) expenditure on health insurance and/or punitive fees for lacking it? Is there some nice published chart somewhere showing that for such-and-such income bracket (let’s say < $2000 per year, or $4000 - $6000 per year, or whatever) the optimal solution is to buy this or that particularly cheap/worthless insurance and for some other such bracket it’s best not to buy anything because the state doesn’t penalize you for not buying because you are too poor? I am trying to read this up online, but the hard-hitting journalists aren’t too hard-hitting in this matter, they haven’t seemed to bother to actually gather up this info and publish it in an accessible manner.