Insurance: Individual Health Insurance

Individual Health Insurance

The name of President Barack Obama’s health care law is, of course, the Affordable Care Act. But a major clash has broken out in Washington regarding what that word “affordable” really means--and billions of dollars in subsidies hang in the balance.As we’ve noted in the past, Richard Burkhauser of Cornell was the first to spot this problem, an error made during the evaluation process of Obama’s law that artificially diminished the cost of its numerous subsidies.Essentially the problem arose when the Joint Committee on Taxation informed the Congressional Budget Office that it should “ignore family members when determining whether employees actually pay more than 9.5 percent of their household income on insurance.” From the article:The instruction was included in a correction of a complex, 150 page March 21 document. The correction read: “ERRATA FOR JCX-18-10 … On page 15, Minimum essential coverage and employer offer of health insurance coverage, in the second sentence of the second paragraph, ‘the type of coverage applicable (e.g., individual or family coverage)’ should be replaced with ‘self-only coverage.’”