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'How Much Will Obamacare Cost Me?' Try Our Calculator
- 001sky 13y agoThe premium is adjusted for family size, tobacco usage, and age of the user... Funny, that one term is not in the questionaire
- taeric 13y agoWhich one? As soon as you pick "adult or child" then it asks if you use tobacco.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Romoku 13y agoYou select the age and tobacco usage when you select how many adults.
- gee_totes 13y agoI actually think their tobacco section is a little buggy. On Chrome on Fedora 17, I wasn't able to get the tool top to pop up to see how "tobacco usage" is defined (some states define it as use within the last 12 months, some states define it as use right now).
- jophde 13y agoWhat kind of idiot would answer yes, to questions like "Do you use Tobacco?" or "Do you use marijuana?" when applying for health care?
- dangrossman 13y agoEthical people, and people who don't want to be bankrupted after paying for health insurance when that insurance doesn't pay out after discovering you lied on the application.
- jophde 13y agoSee my answer below.
- gweinberg 13y agoThe kind that thinks his benefits will be denied when the insurer finds out he lied on his application.
- jophde 13y agoIf I have to penalized for smoking the occasional pipe of tobacco, then I want people to be penalized for buying groceries from Wal-Mart, eating GMOs, anything with high fructose corn syrup in it, and not taking the elevator instead of the stairs for a few flights. It's not ethical to let yourself be gouged by unethical rules.
- debacle 13y agoNo, but if you lie on the application and the insurance company finds out, they're going to drop coverage, and may go after you for insurance fraud.
- benjohnson 13y agoAs I understand it, the true costs will be when employers potentially drop your heath-care coverage and make you temp worker. Given that most people reading HN are employed in areas with high demand, this will probably not happen to you, but it could happen to those that are employed in jobs where there is a more ample pool of workers to draw from. Sadly, it's hard to calculate the chances of this situation happening - so we'll all probably just have to wait and see.
- pstack 13y agoYeah, but that's a small price to pay for every single person in the country to get excellent best-in-world health care for absolutely free. Right? . . . . Right. . . .? At any rate, the NPR calculator only works if you enter the number of people registering for the "Exchange". So, am I to understand that if you're not registering for "The Exchange", then you will bear no additional costs? I had hoped they'd have some crazy complex calculator that would estimate how much your premiums and taxes and other things would go up with existing HMO plans and so on.
- rdl 13y agoMost current individual plans don't technically meet the requirements of ACA, so they're being ended at the end of the year.
- abraham_s 13y agoI find it weird that you don't blame the employers for dumping an employee, to avoid paying 2000$ penalty.
- enraged_camel 13y agoAs we all know, employers are the "job creators" and whatever they do is for the good of the economy. If they are dumping employees to maintain their current profit levels, it's the government's fault for making them do that. /s
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- seldo 13y agoThose in the bay area can try the Covered California calculator, which gives more details on the actual plans that will be available: http://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#calculator http://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#calculator As I am currently self-employed, these plans make insurance a LOT more affordable for me.
- drakaal 13y agoObama Care "costs" more than their calculator because the "$100 a month plan for those making under $50k" cost $1,200 but doesn't give the plan holder anything until they incur $10k in expenses. Basically you Lose $1,200 that you could have spent on healthcare. That $1,200 is a lot when you consider that many of the people with out healthcare end up at the Emergency Room for simple things like Strep Throat and end up paying $500 instead of $80 for a doctor's visit. The best analogy I can think is like the Poor who opt to be unbanked. Many of the unbanked do so because the fees in banking are greater than what the fees are at the Check cashing places because a single overdraft charge. Obama care is really just bankruptcy insurance, and that is kind of what bankruptcy is a way to not lose everything if you can't afford it.
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y agoIs this true?
- clavalle 13y agoYeah, that is how high deductible plans work. But if you are in a car accident and need to be airlifted, have a heart attack, etc etc, it is much better for you to at least have some cap on your out of pocket.
- pseudometa 13y agoTrue.
- briandear 13y agoThen an easier law that even republicans would have supported is to have the government subsidize HDHPs and be done with it. Instead they needed 1200+ pages that the lawmakers didn't even read. Government wasn't after protecting the 'uninsured'-- they wanted to control an industry that makes up 5% of GDP.
- nknighthb 13y agoRepublicans supported the ACA until Obama did. It's based on their own blueprints from the 1990s fight and Massachusetts. And if you're going to whine about the length of the bill, get it right. It's 906 pages with legislative formatting (huge margins, lots of other whitespace). The PDF is trivially googleable.
- joelhaasnoot 13y agoAs a European (Dutch to be exact) that has put up with a very similar universal healthcare, the numbers are actually about the same for me - based on income, I get about the same amount of tax credit here. I'm guessing the conditions of said insurance will be different - no deductible is mentioned for example, while the Netherlands has a 350 euro required deductible.
- maxerickson 13y agoThe deductible is sort of smeared into the out of pocket maximum and actuarial value (but for lots of people it would amount to quite some more than $500).
- debacle 13y agoThe cheapest plans in the US tend to have a deductible of ~3-6k with coinsurance up to a set fixed amount per year, usually close to 10k.
- ck2 13y agoSo apparently through age 50 each person is supposed to give the health insurance corporations nearly a quarter million dollars. I consider myself progressive and this is the most asinine solution I've ever seen. Instead of fixing health care costs we are going to make more billionaire CEOs.
- tunesmith 13y agoI still see hope for how it could play out. I forget the details, but I think states have the ability to experiment with their own alternate exchanges. Like they can experiment with state-run single-payer. And if it proves to work well, more people will switch to it, and other states could grudgingly switch to similar approaches, etc.
- jdlshore 13y agoCompared to what? It's not like people and employers weren't paying for health insurance before. (Okay, there's some low-risk folks who don't pay for insurance now, but they're basically offloading their catastrophic health risk onto society.)
- timr 13y agoYeah, well...there were several different single-payer proposals in the mix, but none made it out of committee, because they were "too radical" to pass the House. And once Scott Brown was elected, anything that even remotely smelled like "socialism" (i.e. simpleton socialism, not real socialism) was off the table. There are no solutions to this problem that don't involve either making consumers aware of how much they're spending on health care (thus aligning economic incentives), or removing the profit-seeking entity from health care altogether. So long as we have consumers who don't know/care what they're paying, medical and insurance companies who have a profit motive, and physicians who have no incentive to consider cost of care, we have an economic recipe for health care hyperinflation. The "conservative" propaganda machine has thoroughly brainwashed our poorest and most vulnerable people into voting against their own economic self-interests on this issue. I don't know what's going to fix it, but until that day, we'll get "free market solutions" that make health corporations richer and don't do anything to fix the underlying economic incentives that are causing the problems.
- pjbrunet 13y agoThis is what I think will happen: 1% of uninsured will jump through all the hoops and apply for a subsidy (which is more complicated and more expensive than just picking up the phone and calling BCBS for a high-deductible plan.) 9% of uninsured will finally get insurance to avoid the $500 IRS fine. 90% will do nothing and get a $500 fine from the IRS. 5% of those people will pay the $500 fine which is cheaper than buying insurance. 45% of them will throw the bill in the trash, assuming the IRS knows where they live/work. The other 50% will raise hell they are not paying $500 to the IRS, Obama will feel like a bully and Obamacare will be history. If I have it totally wrong, don't just downvote, please explain why. I really don't know if the IRS fine will be $500, that's just a number I heard thrown around last year. A $500 fine is less than half the cost a cheap insurance plan for one person, and much cheaper if you have a family. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, a possible $500 fine (that's not even a reality yet) is much less pain than buying insurance right now. My percentage estimates are off the top of my head (not scientific) but I heard 1/3 Americans don't file tax returns so that figured into my estimates. And remember we're talking about uninsured people, I'm thinking a large percentage of them are just getting by.
- clavalle 13y ago>(which is more complicated and more expensive than just picking up the phone and calling BCBS. Source? >The other 50% will raise hell they are not paying $500 to the IRS, Obama will feel like a bully and Obamacare will be history. I am not sure how you make that leap. I think a lot of people will go for the subsidy. Especially people with kids. Two people who together make $30000 with three kids will pay $600/yr for coverage while the fine would be $1000. It only makes sense.
- pjbrunet 13y agoAt this point the fine is still imaginary. Nobody has a $1000 fine in their mailbox yet. People are used to getting money back from the IRS. Most people don't understand what a bill from the IRS means. How many people even know there will be a fine? Has Obama talked about the fine yet? Also, even if you apply for the subsidy, you'll be paying full price for an expensive plan in the meantime. A family that's just getting by (that's why they are uninsured) it's going to be much more affordable to get a high-deductible plan and forget Obamacare altogether. If you're just getting by, you're not planning your finances a year in advance for when the subsidy check might come in the mail. The uninsured are thinking about next month, not a year from now. What percentage of people are sure they will get that government subsidy check? You're assuming uninsured people have extra money saved to pay for a full-price insurance plan right now.
- patja 13y agoIt is interesting that the subsidies are based on your Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI). A nice example of tax code naming conventions: it is both Modified and Adjusted! One of the items you deduct from your income to get your MAGI is self employed insurance premiums. I am curious how this will work in practice for the self employed...it seems a bit recursive. My premiums paid will be influenced by how big of a subsidy I get, and the subsidy calculation depends on MAGI which is influenced by the total of my health insurance premium payments. Is there a class of the donut hole problem where you forecast that you will pay enough in premiums to get your MAGI down to qualify for a subsidy, but that subsidy reduces your actual paid premiums and now you no longer have a MAGI low enough to get the subsidy? Maybe I need to spreadsheet this and it isn't such a trap, or maybe the MAGI deduction is based on the gross premium with the subsidy being a separate credit. Also bear in mind that the whole thing gets trued up when you file your 2014 taxes with your actual (rather than projected) MAGI.
- polymathist 13y agoEither there's a bug in the calculator or the pricing tier is completely senseless. (sorry for the long link, it has all the parameters included) http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/#state=nc&zip=27705&locale=Durham&income-type=dollars&income=5000&employer-coverage=0&people=1&adult-count=2&adults%5B0%5D%5Bage%5D=42&adults%5B0%5D%5Btobacco%5D=0&adults%5B1%5D%5Bage%5D=44&adults%5B1%5D%5Btobacco%5D=0&child-count=0&child-tobacco=0 http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/#state=nc&zip=... Two adults living in NC and making $5,000/yr are expected to pay an annual premium of $6,901, which is 138.02% of their annual income! What!?
- clavalle 13y agoBecause you would be eligible for Medicaid.
- mgkimsal 13y agosomething does seem wrong - up that to 11k and you get 'better' numbers (more intuitive) - they may not have tested with numbers as low as you put in??? Also, fwiw, you only had 1 family member, but 2 enrolling, but that didn't seem to affect the issue.
- daguar 13y agoTL;DR: In states where Republican governors are choosing not to accept federal money to expand Medicaid, the very poor are getting screwed. From the calculator: "If your state does not expand Medicaid You will not be eligible for subsidies in the exchanges because your income is below 100% of the federal poverty level." The reason for this is that the law provided federal dollars to states to expand Medicaid coverage (pretty much free coverage for enrollees) to all people making < 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL), and so the EXCHANGE SUBSIDIES were only written to apply to folks above 138% FPL. Problem is, the law didn't say that these (very poor) people could receive subsidies for the Exchanges if the Governor refused to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid -- basically because no one thought governors would be so brash as to refuse free money to pay for the health care of the very poor. So, yeah. Kinda sucks to live in a Republican state right now if you're poor and uninsured.
- jdlshore 13y agoThe most important thing to note about this calculator is that it's based on CBO estimates, not actual insurance plans: "Premiums in the calculator are illustrative examples in 2014 dollars derived from estimates of average premiums for 2016 from the Congressional Budget Office." [1] And apparently, 94% of uninsured Americans will have premiums that are less than projected [2]. Even with those caveats, my costs are estimated to go down. This is very good news for me, as someone with individual insurance, because health costs are the dominating factor in my budget. [1] Second paragraph of the "Notes" section under the calculator's results. [2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/09/25/obamacare_premiums_will_be_cheaper_than_the_cbo_projected.html?wpisrc=burger_bar http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/09/25/obamacare_pre...
- daguar 13y agoThe federal premiums will be available on Oct 1. California's premiums are already available here: http://www.coveredca.com/ http://www.coveredca.com/
- crazygringo 13y agoWhat legally counts as "tobacco usage"? Sure, if you smoke a pack a day. What if you just have a couple of cigarettes when you go out, a couple nights a week? What about once a month? If you smoke a cigar when your baby's born? Unlike the other categories, "tobacco use" doesn't make a lot of sense... and out of all the dangerous, life-threatening activities you can partake in, why is only this one singled out? Why not change premiums based on BMI too? It's kind of bizarre.
- tptacek 13y agoThis is just a calculator. A real individual health insurance application would probably also ask for weight, which is the other important statistical indicator that you're likely to be expensive to insure. Most of the other dangerous, life-threatening activities you're thinking of are more likely to simply kill you than to require an insurance company to spend 10 years paying 150x the costs of a typical policyholder. I'd assume what "counts" is any tobacco use. If you smoke when you go out a couple nights a week, you're a smoker.
- daguar 13y agoActually, starting in 2014, the only criteria that can be taken into account* to charge you a different premium are: - Age - Individual vs. family - Location (area) - Tobacco usage * This is in the individual and small group markets; does not apply to large group purchasers. Source: http://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/8061-021.pdf http://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/80... (page 5)
- daguar 13y agoPer the CMS regulations: "Under the final rule, “tobacco use” is defined as the use of a tobacco product or products four or more times per week within no longer than the past 6 months by legal users of tobacco products (generally those 18 years and older) and includes all tobacco products." Source: http://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Files/Downloads/market-rules-technical-summary-2-27-2013.pdf http://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Files/Downloads/market-ru... (page 3)
- Kequc 13y agoThe number that came up is the cheapest health insurance ever, man. Who could possibly complain about that. It is like 5% of my income unless something went wrong in the calculation.
- dangrossman 13y agoMy estimate was 3 times what I'm paying now, for my own non-subsidized plan.
- jdlshore 13y agoAre you young, with no history of health problems? Under the ACA, older people pay less and younger people pay more (because "old people" premiums are limited to 3x "young people" premiums), and people with a poor health pay less and people with good health pay more (because health history is no longer considered in premiums). If not, do you have a very high deductible and max out-of-pocket? The ACA puts limits on the maximum out-of-pocket. If not, are you on a group plan of some sort? Individual rates tend to be more expensive than group rates. If not, can you sign me up? 'Cause I'd love to cut my healthcare premiums by 3x. :-D
- gweinberg 13y agoAccording to the calculator, I'll be paying about the same as what I'm paying now with COBRA.
- debacle 13y agoIf your MAGI is above a certain level, that's kind of the point.
- DennisP 13y agoSomething I've been wondering: I've got a pretty fair amount of savings. Suppose I go on sabbatical for a year to do a startup, spruce up my github, whatever. For the sake of argument say I don't have COBRA. Everything I've read talks about income, not net worth. If I'm not making income, am I stuck with Medicaid, even though I have a decent net worth? Or if I do a little consulting and make $20K, do I get subsidies on the exchange, even though I really don't need them?
- daguar 13y agoYes -- subsidies are tied to income, not assets (specifically, modified adjusted gross income [MAGI]). There are reasonable arguments around the equity of this, but, as you describe, it actually opens a big door for wishing to try a more entrepreneurial venture -- especially for those with health conditions.
- DennisP 13y agoInteresting. What about medicaid though? From what I've seen there's a minimum income to get the regular plans on the exchange, and below that you have to go with medicaid (assuming there aren't net worth qualifications for that).
- daguar 13y agoMedicaid does have some asset tests. Below 138% of the federal poverty level, you would qualify for Medicaid. [1] If you had ethical qualms about it (or couldn't pass the asset tests) you can absolutely purchase a plan on the Exchange -- you just wouldn't receive a subsidy. [1] In states that have opted to expand it, see my other comment.
- DennisP 13y agoAh good. One last question, if you don't mind: how does the subsidy work for a freelancer, who doesn't know his annual income until the year's over?