So I'd be eligible for a $707 subsidy. But on the Hawaii website even if I drop my income down to 25K I am not seeing a subsidy.
I am I understanding how the subsidy works properly?
I don't know the answer to your question.
But one thing I do want to mention is that it looks like subsidies often don't really amount to much if you aren't substantially below the cap.
I am not applying to ACA this year since I and kids have coverage through DH's retiree insurance (DH himself is on medicare). Premiums went way up this year (to $780 a month on the high-deductible plan) so I was curious about ACA costs even though I don't plan to jump to it this year.
I didn't want to go through the hassle of doing an actual app so I looked at
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to see the cost of plans and to see how much difference a subsidy would make. There are unsubsidized plans that are about the same as or cheaper than the $770 we are paying now but the deductible is vastly different. The family deductible we have now is $3000 while these call for family deductibles of $12700 a year. Big difference. Only a few of the plans have family deductibles that are close to what we are paying so I was curious about subsidies.
I first put in what would happen if our income was about $2000 a year less than the cap. This resulted in a subsidy of about $360 a year. I then put in an income $10000 below the cap (this is for a family of 4). This resulted in a subsidy of about $1200 a year. Better, but I'm not sure it is enough to make it worthwhile to do all the gyrations that would be necessary to become subsidy eligible. Further it would probably be a thing where we load all the income in one year and so wouldn't be eligible that year but might be eligible the next.
The net is that the premiums are higher than the $780 a month we will be paying next year (an increase from $479) but are often not horribly higher. What is horribly different is that the deductibles for family coverage are astronomical.
For example, even a gold Blue Cross policy has a family deductible of $9000 with an individual deductible of $3000.
One thing that isn't clear in this material, btw, is how family deductibles work. The policies we used to have each individual had to meet the deductible for that person but if you collectively reached the "family" deductible then you didn't have to meet it for an individual. So if you had $1500 individual deductible and $3000 family deductible and there were 5 people in the family, once any combination of people met $3000 then no one else had to meet a deductible.
The high deductible policy we have now has those same limits on paper but the individual deductible doesn't apply at all for family policies. If I go in and have $2000 in health care costs there is no coverage for the $500 over the individual deductible. There is only coverage once $3000 is met.
I don't know how deductibles work on the exchange policies.
That is if a policy has a $3000 individual deductible and $9000 family deductible, what happens in a specific individual has $5000 work of costs. Are $2000 paid by the policy or is nothing paid because the $9000 hasn't been met yet?
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