Huh. Well THAT changes my math somewhat.
So through 2015 I understood the ACA pretty well and as you’re supposed to do with taxes, credits, whatever – I’ve been aiming my numbers to leave as little EXTRA money in the hands of the government as possible. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm believer in paying my percentage because I’m a firm believer that I use roads and lights, water and air that someone else is doing an AWFUL lot of work to create, clean and / or maintain – and I also believe that the people who can stand on the street and claim they take nothing from the government and should GIVE nothing to the government are the worst kind of self-delusional fools. I certainly don’t approve of a vast many things that the United States gets up to, but when I look at what I put into the system, I think my clean water and my interstates and my waste management and my legal system, broken though much of it may be, still comes at a bargain price. That being said, I don’t have a whole lot of money to spare – and so I really try to aim NOT to give extra (and therefore don’t get much of a rebate).
Due to one of my employers being somewhat new to the game of finance and rather chaotic, I had to file for an extension this year (second time I’ve ever done this) and hadn’t looked too carefully at how my 2014 taxes had shaped up until just recently. Though I feel like I Live comfortably, I am technically well below the poverty line – despite this I’ve bought my own health insurance for almost two decades now and over that time the price has more than quadrupled. Until the ACA went into place I was just about to be priced out of the system – the subsidies were a HUGE relief last year. What I DIDN’T realize was that the rest of my premiums were going to get paid back to me too.
I checked my numbers twice, but filing form 1095-A really just changed my world substantially.
And so what’s the point? Money’s been shuffled around. I pay the health insurance company, the government pays me out of funds collected from others. Wealth has been redistributed and if people are successfully filing their taxes (a big IF) a LOT of cash is being shuffled around at this level.
Yay health insurance! But I wonder how much is being lost here being shuffled from place to place. I know plenty of people were crying foul (or rather “socialism”) over this (and Social Security before it) but it really seems like a single-payer system couldn’t HELP but be more efficient.
I mean really : we all pay our taxes into the system, whether income tax, or sales tax, or tolls or lottery tickets or WHATEVER. It all gets shuffled around. It gets paid BACK to me since I’ve been paying my money to the health insurer, who’s job isn’t just to insure me, but to also advertise the fact that they insure me and lobby the government in order to make sure they can go ON insuring me and who knows what else… then THEIR job is to take whatever they’ve got left over and absolutely try to AVOID paying doctors because their REAL job is pay out to their stock holders and CEO… I know people don’t trust the federal government but at least it’s comprised of people who aren’t making a commission and who at least 50% I imagine joined up because they were doing the right thing AND they don’t have to advertise… meh. Yay I’m getting my money back but it’s kind of convoluted, don’t you think?
Slingshot orbit, but for cash. I’ll think I’ll shoot it off on another one, but rather than
shooting it through the tax system (an ablative process, like a comet coming close to the sun, where you lose a percentage) I think I need to fire it through the investment system (an additive process, hopefully)…
2015’s taxes definitely won’t see this level of windfall because I’d adjusted my finances substantially, being newly confident that the ACA wasn’t going anywhere – but – thanks Obama! I think*.
*Actually there’s no question about this, what was the percentage I was getting back out of my insurance checks before? Zero. So, no really, thanks Obama!
