4 ms·

I don't know how it would be done, but I can only see two scenarios. One is to charge the insured the full, unsubsidized premium, and give the tax credit in 20

I don't know how it would be done, but I can only see two scenarios. One is to charge the insured the full, unsubsidized premium, and give the tax credit in 2015. The other is to pay the subsidy to the insurance company throughout the year. In the former situation, some people just cannot afford it. In the latter situation, you can have some fraud (by the insurance companies). I guess they could offer both options, and if you choose the latter, you need to apply through the government, so they can verify that you exist, etc.

tanzam75 13y ago
I'm not convinced that insurance fraud will actually be a big problem. Just do a random spot-check of all the policyholders that the insurance company is claiming a subsidy for. If the amount claimed is more than x% over the amount calculated by the government, then the insurance company gets cut off. Right now, by forcing people to buy on-exchange to get the subsidy, we're essentially doing the spot-check interactively. This is putting tremendous load on the healthcare.gov back-end. There's no reason this couldn't have been done as a batch process instead.