Young adults are now facing a difficult choice on health insurance issue. They either have to earn more to get health care insurance or should pay for the fines.
The health care law has established a tougher policy in this early 2016. According to the ABC News, there is a sharp increase in the fine amounts applied for young adults who do not have any health care insurance. For those who are uninsured during 12 months will get the minimum of $695 fine. No discharge will be entitled.
The discrepancy is very obvious compared to the $325 fine in 2015. In average, each family could get almost $1,000 fine. Currently, millions of young adults are still uninsured because they think they are healthy. And today, they have to consider further as the fines for not being uninsured is doubled.
Lately, a Kaiser poll reports that almost half of the uninsured people have tried to get health care insurance, but they still cannot afford it. However, they do not have much time to decide as the deadline is quite close. On January 31, the open enrollment for health care ends.
HealthCare gives more explanation on how the penalty will be imposed. Fines will be calculated in 2 ways - as a percentage of the household income, or per person. You will pay whichever is bigger.
If you use the percentage system, you only need to count the part of your household income that's above the annual tax filing threshold. If you use per person system, you only pay for the uninsured people in your household.
Kaiser Family Foundation, as mentioned in TH Online, has also suggested from its study that most of the fines will be higher because the penalty is counted 2.5 percent from the taxable income this year. Therefore, the typical amount of penalty for uninsured household is around $969.
Uninsured people usually pay their fines through their tax returns. Their tax refunds will be deducted by the fine amounts. Furthermore, the amount of penalty will be added by a cost-of-living factor in future years.
Andy Slavitt, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a recent speech, "The tax penalty is bringing more young and healthy consumers into the market. We are using a large portion of our marketing resources to make sure that consumers are aware of the increasing fee for people that go without insurance."
This new policy in health care issue is another effort to make healthy people get insured and facilitate premiums to be accessible for everyone. There have been many benefits emphasized by the official, including subsidized insurances and protection from the costs of unanticipated injury or serious illness. However, it still cannot do much as many young and healthy people are still uninsured. Therefore, more threats are to be applied.
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