Quote from: Spendulus on February 03, 2014, 07:36:08 PM

Quote from: farlack on February 03, 2014, 06:25:21 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on February 03, 2014, 05:26:23 PM

Quote from: farlack on February 03, 2014, 05:01:42 PM

Your tax penalty (shared responsibility fee) for not having insurance is paid on your taxes at the end of the year. If your taxable income is below 133% of the FPL you are exempt from this tax.

Why not just pay the small amount it takes to get insurance? It will be cheaper to have it, than to pay the tax. You pay a small % and the government pays the rest..

You answered your own question right out of the gate. The vast majority of the uninsured are uninsured because they don't have reliable employment to produce such a taxable income. That is not to say that most of these people don't actually have an income, just not a taxable one. It's actually not very difficult for a young, single person to make a good living if they don't have a problem with the kind of work that doesn't tend to produce a W2 form with your own name on it. That kind of work also makes it easier to qualify for government aid at the same time, but to a 20 something hustler with no known medical issues, paying any kind of premium has always been a non-starter. That's why they didn't bother before.

You're just making shit up, the vast majority?? I don't have insurance and way above the FPL level.. No one was talking about the FPL level.. What you quoted was talking about the fee that comes along when you don't get insurance.. not being to poor to get it and not getting a fine.

For sure, the only rational discussion would be based on the individual self-optimizing for his own economic welfare and that of his family.

But my earlier comment pretty much stands: Who would buy insurance with a ridiculous deductible, when alternately they could pay the penalty (let's not call it a "fee" or a "shared responsibility fee", PLEASE no sugar coating shit here) ...

and have no deductible?

My point was that the fee was meaningless to those for whom the law was targeted to attract; namely the young, healty and uninsured that are needed to pay premiums to subsidize the older and less helathy with pre-existing conditions. The young and healty are the majority of the uninsured Americans that this bill was aimed at, that much is fact. But if you were young, healthy and officially unemployed (but had an unofficial form of income) what value would you see in paying any premium at all, if you didn't see such value before this, and the law specificly exempts you from the penalty because you don't pay taxes? You could argue that such officially unemployed young with non-taxable incomes is the minority, but the statisics on System D economies says otherwise.