So here I go head to the ACA exchange for 2017...advice please.

[ivinsfan]

Well, after our small family owned C corp paying all insurance bills for the 4/owners and families for over 25 years the party has come to an end.

We will not be offering that as a benefit for 2017. We are on a small group plan and just got our renewal notice for 3 members age early 60 and mid 50's a Bronze plan that will cost 2000 a month. Our fourth member is on Medicare. We will write a formal letter to the employees cancelling their insurance.

We plan to discontinue coverage for employees on Dec 31. I'm going to be using MNSure but I did have a few general questions that I'm hoping to get real world answers for.

First of all. the employees are either owners or spouse of owners in the C Corp. Would this be any problem for an exchange written plan. I'm curious because what they call the SHOP plan for small business enrollment, which qualifies your business for a write off tax credit, disallows all owners and family from the credit portion of the premium. So that program was completely useless to us.The owners are 2 brothers so we will be doing this together is insure consistently with our income verification procedures, we want to get it right. I think it might be best to just use a MN Sure broker for everything.

Secondly it's a crop farm business with huge swings in income and profits solely due to cash prices for crops. Generally we just leave our money in the business checking account for cash flow purposes and when we see year end results we will pay wage and cash rent. We also leave enough to pay for all of next years inputs and costs since we don't borrow money.

We have a general idea of what we will make and so we make estimated tax payments quarterly. So we do have room to make our income higher or lower, however we don't have to try this year. present prices most likely will make this year and next year lower income. So basically we might have a couple of paper checks and a W-2 to prove income and that all. Do you think that will satisfy income requirements. I feel that MN does have a lot of smaller farms who are probably on the exchange but our set up in a little unusual in how we pay out money.

Does anyone have any tips as how we might make this a smoother transition? I'm concerned because as expensive as the group is going solo and not qualifying for subsidy would be much more expensive and the worst possible outcome for us.

Any other general tips would be greatly appreciated.

 

[socca]

Each person who formerly received health insurance from your C-corp and will now receive individual insurance via the ACA will need to estimate their 2017 modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) and have this number available when they apply for 2017 health insurance. My understanding is that it's not a big deal if a person underestimates MAGI and thus receives excess health insurance subsidies. The IRS will clawback those excess subsidies when the actual MAGI is known. I'm in the farming biz, too, so I'm familiar with the problem of fluctuating income.