These plans are not “essential minimum coverage” as defined by ACA. Therefore, they won’t prevent you from being hit with the penalty. I’m not sure whether they’re available at all any more.
The best substitute someone could find today is probably a health care coop/ministry. These are not essential minimum coverage either, but an exception to the penalty exists for them. Lots are only $50 or $60/month. It’s not health insurance; rather, they work by reimbursing some portion of your expenses, up to the money that other participants have put into the common pool through their own monthly. If your only purpose is to eliminate the penalty, a health care coop might come out in your favor.
These can be tough to find if you’re not affiliated with whatever ministry runs them, however.
Here’s a bookthat talks about some of the options to not paying for Obamacare. Disclaimer: the author is a personal friend, and I bought it for that reason, as I’ve got good coverage through the workplace. It seems pretty comprehensive, however, and in fact that’s where I learned that there is one ministry that is not explicitly tied to a religion.
I have the Kindle version of the book and it is lendable; if anyone would like to borrow it, PM me with your email address. One at a time, of course, and I don’t know how long the lending period is for. If you find it useful, please consider plunking down the money to buy it though, as I have to look the author in the eye :D.
I was under the impression that an lot of surprise hospital bills can be negotiated down to a very small fraction of the original cost. I.e. the hospital chargemaster asks $100k, but most insurers pay $30k, and medicare only pays $15k. If you have no insurance or significant assets besides emergency savings, the hospital will probably accept whatever cash you’ve been saving as self insurance. After all, $13k will be a hell of a lot more than they’d get from selling the debt to a collector.
If that’s the case, then self-insurance will protect against a decent chunk of risk.
Of course, any really huge hospital bill or ongoing condition will wipe that out, which means the future will be bankruptcy, poverty, and Medicaid…
I’m an independent contractor and there is generally no refund back to me. The IRS sent me a bill for the $700 dollars. I think the option is if they can take it out of the refund but they can also just bill you directly.
Yes, emergency hospital bills can (usually) be negotiated down, at least to a degree. The real problem, as I noted above, is when the condition is not immediately life-threatening. In those situations, hospitals generally have no obligation to offer treatment until you’ve reached satisfactory financial arrangements, and what constitutes “satisfactory” to them before they have incurred costs is usually quite different (and very substantially more) than what is satisfactory after the fact, when they are faced with either collecting what you’ve got or selling/writing off the debt altogether.
In the example you posted above, if the published rate is $100K, but most insurers only pay $30K, they can still ask you for $40K, paid in full, BEFORE they admit you. If you are in a demographic where they might get lots of bad publicity for denying you (kids or little old widow ladies, e.g.), that might give you a bit of leverage, but a 57-year-old who just didn’t think insurance was a good deal is unlikely to generate near as much sympathy from the public at large.
If the treatment you’re needing is for example a knee replacement or some other quality-of-life surgery, you could be in pain for a long time while trying to get the money together. If the treatment you’re needing is chemo for aggressive cancer, you might be beyond treatment by the time the finances come together.
Whether this risk is something the OP is willing to accept is, of course, a matter for the OP to decide.
I’ve now looked at the back of the IRS bill and only there does it list the several limitations of how it come after you for an Obamacare bill. Ie no liens, fines, levys etc as they can with normal IRS bill. On the front it’s just a regular “You’d better pay this now!” IRS bill. Clever!
But I can conceive of a situation in which a person might be willing to pay the penalty rather than shell out for ACA-compliant coverage, but still not want to be bankrupted in case of a serious medical issue and want SOME minimal level of coverage for that reason.
(And as I have posted over and over again, and in another thread just a few days ago, if you’ve never had a remotely serious medical issue that you had to pay for out of pocket, it might shock you just how minor a medical issue can run into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I broke my leg in 1996 while 2 days short of coverage at a new job; it was a really horrendous fracture that, in the end, required 4 rounds of surgery, 2 weeks in the hospital, and hundreds of hours of PT. The ER, ambulance, and one night in the hospital alone cost over $5k, at 1996 prices. The whole shebang cost over $100k at HMO-negotiated prices once my coverage kicked in. Not many people have that kind of risk tolerance. And that’s a broken leg, not cancer - cancer doesn’t get treated in the ER until you’re pretty far gone.)
At your age, going without medical insure is quite a gamble! How much do you value your life? One tip: if you decide to go without, consider medical tourism if you need an expensive elective procedure done. You’ll save bigly.
Check out the Farm Bureau in your state. They sell compliant plans and there is a pretty good range of plans from which to choose. I’m in the same boat, and am moving to another state that has more choice.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
No. Although I generally support the ACA, I think restricting what kind of plans could be sold was uncessary and produced a lot of unnecessary fallout (remember Obama’s lie about being able to "keep your old plan if you like it). My company used to sell plans with up to $10,000-$20,000 deductibles. whch was more the idea of traditional insurance than one that provides 100% coverage for your kid’s checkup. We’ve expected insurance to act more like a reimbursement account with premiums consummate.
These made sense for young, healthy people that had home equity or a 401K or something they could tap to pay it on the remote chance something bad happened, but ACA put the kibosh on them. Same with some other creative, cost saving benefits. Don’t want kids? Sorry, but all policies sold now included maternity coverage so you’re subsidizing those that do. (are no-maternity coverage plans were wildly popular with Millennials). Don’t do drugs? Sorry, but all policies sold contain substance abuse coverage.
The problem is that the chances of something happening are really not that remote. There are about 40 million injury-related ER visits a year, more or less evenly spread among “young, healthy people” and the old or infirm. The average reimbursement cost of an ER visit generally is $1,300. The billed rate and the uninsured rate - assuming no write-off - are significantly higher, of course.
A person who drives 12,000 miles a year has about a one in forty chance of sustaining an accident that requires emergency care. The average cost of an MVA-related ER visit is $3,500.
The very low penalties (2.5%) compared to the cost of premiums is the biggest reason the ACA is in so much trouble. Young healthy people do the math and decide they’d rather pay a couple hundred dollars in penalties than thousands of dollars in premiums for insurance they’re unlikely to use. Without young healthy people in the insured pool, the insurance companies have to increase premiums to cover costs.
The penalties should have been set high enough to drive healthy people to get the insurance, but they weren’t, which sent the plans into the current unsustainable cycle of rising premiums.