Confused about whether you will need to buy health insurance under the Obamacare mandate? Here is a chart from the Kaiser Foundation Family website that helps you sort things through:
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Do the Obamacare Subsidies Make the Individual Mandate Unnecessary?
Lost in all the confusion about Obamacare is the fact that the law relies on more than just the individual mandate to encourage people to buy health insurance. It also makes health insurance more affordable, especially for people at or below 400% of the federal poverty limit by subsidizing insurance for those folks. So do we even need a mandate or will those subsidies be enough?
First off, it helps to remember that one of the goals of Obamacare is to make sure that people are not priced out of the insurance market once they develop serious chronic illnesses. If an insurance company finds out that a man has prostate cancer, or a woman has coronary artery disease, the company would normally consider those illnesses when estimating how much they need to charge those people for their individual premiums. After all, these people are likely to have more medical expenses then healthier customers. If the price of insurance didn’t reflect their underlying health, that insurance company would be at a competitive disadvantage. But of course this very sensible action by the insurance company would price many such people out of the insurance market… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)
Why We Need More Twelve-Year-Olds Teaching Health Policy
I come from an ardent Republican family. Suspicion of government, you could say, runs in my genes. No surprise then that the first time my parents and siblings heard about Obama’s individual health insurance mandate, they were against it… (Read more and view comments at The Human Capital Blog)
A 12 Year Old Figures Out the Importance of the Health Insurance Mandate
See a video where I talk to my twelve year old son about health insurance, unrehearsed, and try to see whether he will be able to figure out the importance of the health insurance mandate. I think you will agree that this is an idea even a sixth grader can understand. Which is sad, because most people hold a strong opinion about this topic without grasping even its most basic strengths and weaknesses.
Now if the Obama team will work on helping American adults understand the benefits of getting everyone to get insurance!
httpv://youtu.be/IDKWW7LNEAs