WASHINGTON — A "family glitch" in the 2010 health care law threatens to cost some families thousands of dollars in health insurance costs and leave up to 500,000 children without coverage, insurance and health care analysts say.
That's unless Congress fixes the problem, which seems unlikely given the House's latest move Friday to strip funding from the Affordable Care Act.
Congress defined "affordable" as 9.5% or less of an employee's household income, mostly to make sure people did not leave their workplace plans for subsidized coverage through the exchanges. But the "error" was that it only applies to the employee — and not his or her family. So, if an employer offers a woman affordable insurance, but doesn't provide it for her family, they cannot get subsidized help through the state health exchanges.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/09/23/aca-family-glitch-issues/2804017/ As Robert Pear reported in The Times recently, the law considers a worker’s share of the insurance premium unaffordable when it exceeds 9.5 percent of the worker’s household income. But that calculation is based on individual coverage for the worker alone, not family coverage, which is much more expensive. That is how the wording of the law has been interpreted by the Internal Revenue Service and the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
Analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization, estimated that in 2008, 3.9 million nonworking dependents were in families in which the worker could afford individual coverage (costing less than 9.5 percent of household income) but not the family plan, which cost, on average, 14 percent of household income.
In the most recent Kaiser survey, in 2011, the worker’s share of the premium for individual coverage averaged $920 a year, meaning that any family making $9,700 or more would be deemed to have affordable insurance. But the share for a family policy cost workers an average of $4,130 a year, far more than what most low-income families can pay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/a-glitch-in-health-care-reform.html?_r=0
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