Getting Personal With Your Health Insurance Exchange Questions
With the launch of new health insurance exchanges just about two weeks away, many of the questions in this month's mailbag focused less on the big picture and more on exactly how the law will operate for individuals.
We can't answer every question we get. But here is a sampling of questions that were really popular, or that would apply to a lot of people.
One of those questions came from Melanie Wilson of Kittery, Maine. "I'm self-employed and my yearly income varies widely form year to year," she writes. She wants to know if the subsidies available for health insurance premiums will be based on gross or net income. "Since I'm self-employed I have a lot of deductions, so my gross my looks good but at the end of the year the net can be pretty minimal."
The subsidies, which are available to those earning between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level, are based on your modified adjusted gross income, or MAGI. That includes things like wages and interest, less deductions like tuition and alimony, and additional payroll taxes paid by the self-employed. You'll be asked to estimate what your income will be for next year; if you're wrong, you'll have to reconcile with the IRS come tax time the following April.
So What's With Those Subsidies?
NPR listeners have lots of questions about how health insurance exchanges will work. Here are more answers from Julie.
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