Well, you shouldn’t be surprised to find another problem surfacing from a poorly written bill that wasn’t read. This time it has to do with how much you should pay for health care insurance. Obamacare has currently limited that amount to 9.5% of the income you bring in. It sounds good, right? But as usual, this isn’t what it seems. Instead, it has opened a can of worms in which there is no possible resolution at this point in time.
This “glitch” hits the working class of America. The class where the employer can’t afford to pay for your family’s premiums. While they cover you, they don’t cover your family. Since your family’s premiums are likely to exceed the 9.5% limit on your income, your family goes without coverage. What’s worse is that the Government won’t subsidize you for this coverage. This means that your family and your children won’t have any insurance coverage. The newest estimate put out by the CBO says that this “glitch” will hit nearly seven million people. Wow, so much for affordable insurance coverage for everyone.
If you haven’t already, you should be taking a very close look at the company you work for. The only way to tell if this is going to affect you before it is too late is to read your company’s financial pages, then do a little math. If the company’s profit margin isn’t that big, don’t expect them to suddenly start offering to cover your family. It more than likely isn’t going to happen. You could be one of the ones caught in this “glitch.” If your employer currently isn’t covering your family, then don’t expect any changes to include them. You are also likely to be caught up.
The IRS did put out a partial fix. It isn’t a great one but it is probably as good as the IRS can do. They won’t charge you the penalty if you fall in this category. But you need to be very careful when doing your taxes or pay attention when someone else is doing your taxes, because you may wind up paying the penalty anyway. This is if the preparer is unaware of this rule change and whether or not you fall under this “glitch.”
But it all circles back to the real reason why Obamacare was doomed from the beginning. The bill failed to control the cost of health care. It is this fundamental failure that basically makes health care as unaffordable under the new system as it is now. It has no power to control costs. All it does is regulate what you don’t pay out of pocket for, which is ironically adding to your monthly premiums. Which in turn is causing costs to skyrocket. Which makes the premiums more unaffordable. At this point, I am convinced that neither Congress nor the President is aware of what affordable actually means.