All you have to do to avoid the fine is click the “I couldn’t find any health insurance I could afford” box and voila pay no fine.
Thought Rs got rid of the individual mandate all together?
Me too
Technically last year was the last year (2018 taxes) you had to pay a fine. Not sure how or if they enforced it. Also supposedly you could appeal with a sob story and usually get it approved.
I was worried I’d have to do that, because I stopped paying insurance from my old company after the 6 months of cheap ($190) went up to full price ($700). But luckily the form they sent showed I had insurance all year.
The fine is $0 for not having coverage
For 2019 tax year. For 2018 there was still a fine. And it was the year the full degree of fines kicked in.
I calculated and my fine for missing 3 months (Jul-Sept) could have been $2700. I paid for Kaiser from Oct-Dec just to try to make a case for my eventually sob story. But then my old company bailed me out and filled out the form like I paid for the whole year.
I don’t know, I don’t use an accountant, I do my taxes on TaxAct. It automatically calculated a penalty because I didn’t have continuous coverage. If there was some loophole I didn’t know about then so be it. I assumed the web interface knew all that stuff.
And yeah I was filing for the last year the mandate was still in effect.
I don’t recall such a box, but either way, ticking it would be hard to explain in an audit, considering I had in fact signed up for a year of health insurance and made the monthly payments in hopes of getting them back as a rebate.
Also, even had that BS not happened, I probably still wouldn’t have signed back up the next year, since I knew my income would be higher. I’m not paying 900/mo for a reverse lottery ticket. I’m super healthy, far from rich, and I know that lousy plan shouldn’t cost 900/mo, so it’s also the principle of it. Fuck being driven by fear and letting myself be extorted. I can pay out-of-pocket for normal things if they come up.
Maybe I’ll get insured again next sign-up period if the prices decrease, which they actually might.
Crap I hope it wasn’t much of a penalty. I was definitely told you were allowed a 1-month gap. Also you can write the sob letter if all else fails and given the climate I assume they’d approve it.
When I switched jobs I had a month waiting period for the new insurance to kick in, so I elected COBRA and sent in the obscene premium (seriously, it was over $2k for a single month).
I later learned you can just wait, see if you use the insurance, then retroactively elect to continue coverage / pay the premium. A+ system we have here.
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I’ve erased much of the ordeal from my memory, but I think it was around a grand. The bigger blow was not getting the big rebate I was expecting. I thought they’d owe me several thousand, but instead I owed them a few thousand.
And I chose the rebate instead of the option of zero up-front payments because I didn’t want to try proving lack of income. But I sure did lack it lol, because I took most of the year off of poker to try some stupid financial gig for sweatshop pay (and a chance to make it big, which didn’t happen).
Not to rub it in - but I wouldn’t be surprised if an accountant might have saved you more money than it would cost.
Yeah, once I got hit with the surprise, that’s when I should have hired an accountant to see if there was a way out.
So for our second child my wife had to be hospitalized for a month before she gave birth and my son had to be in the NICU for a month afterwards.
She works for the hospital and the bills were horrendous. Random bills for hundreds to thousands of dollars coming in with no rhyme or rhythm. We thought we had paid all the bills until 11 months later we get a bill for 10,000. I stared at the bill for 10 minutes because I had never got a bill for so much at one time. Seemed unreal. Apparently the NICU doctors were out of network. Out of network… at the flagship hospital… on the insurance… of the hospital itself.
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JFC.
Democrats should start a mail campaign of fake hospital bills for thousands of dollars. On the back it’s like, “Just kidding, but this is a copy of an ACTUAL bill sent to an ACTUAL person who had ACTUAL private health insurance. Vote Blue.”
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That’s horrible. But what if some idiots like their insurance?
What a complete fucking scam the American health insurance industry is.
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Why didn’t you check to see if every possible doctor was in network before labor?
How excited were you to have CHOICE?
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Seeing Pete bankrupted by medical bills somehow in a non-life threatening scenerio is what I’m rooting for. That way he can really experienced first hand the stupidity of his beloved choice bullshit.
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I’ve almost posted a few times asking how the “in and out of network” became a thing apart from just a way of scamming people for more money. But then I just think what sort of idiot naive question is that? Of course that’s all it’s for and everyone already knows it.
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Preach Johnny that is 100% on point.