Too little, too late

By far, the most-viewed post on this blog is my Health Insurance post.  Mostly viewed by bots, I presume, but still.

Biden and Obama just had their little Obamacare celebration at the White House, which I saw variously described beforehand as "promoting" and "pushing" the Affordable Care Act, which is an odd way to talk about an epic piece of legislation that was passed en masse twelve years ago, and that supposedly is very popular, and that is also supposedly politically impossible to repeal.

There have been a number of articles recently about finally doing something about the "family glitch" that I described--where health insurance is deemed affordable if the cost of employer-based coverage for a single worker is within 9.5% of their income, and never mind if they are buying family coverage also--because they are not eligible to purchase coverage on the exchanges at all, on account of the coverage available through the employer.

Apparently Biden is about to solve this problem by executive order [Edit: here], and there may be legislative action later on. 

From what I've seen so far, the executive order would allow family members affected by the glitch to buy subsidized insurance on the exchanges, beginning with January 2023 coverage.  They anticipate that about one million of the several million glitched families would do so, along with maybe 200,000 people who are presently uninsured.

I'm sure that the administration will manage to mess up the implementation of this somehow.  This is especially likely when calculating subsidy amounts, since the exact amount ought to depend on how much the breadwinner is paying through their employer in premiums--which can change mid-year as the employee hits a birthday and moves up a price bracket. 

One feature of our present coverage is that after we pay the premiums for the first three children, the rest are included at no additional cost.  This has been the case across various plans from various insurance companies, but I don't know where it came from and I don't believe that it will necessarily be the case with the plans on the exchanges.

I'm not very happy about the idea of having different health insurance for different family members, and having to learn to deal with the exchange, and then perhaps actually having to do so.  It is complex enough when everyone is on the same plan, and when the employer's HR drone is handling the annual health plan shopping and application process.

People have been complaining a lot about the recent inflation, but the truth is that there is still a lot of slack in most people's finances that goes to things beyond the austere basics.  The Biden administration has to deal with the family glitch soon, though, because many of these families have had much less slack for almost seven years now.  The increases in the standard deduction and in child tax credits have only partially offset the premium costs in absolute terms, and the uneven distribution of subsidies created a substantial relative differential in disposable income.

Finally, this fix to the family glitch would only return our out-of-pocket premium costs to roughly the pre-Affordable Care Act level.  Obama promised that premiums would be lower by $2500 per year, remember?

Well???

There are ways that could be accomplished, but you can be sure that that is how it will not be done.