A report from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa says Obamacare penalizes married couples by making it more difficult for them to obtain insurance subsidies, according to
The Hill newspaper.
“While the intent of the [healthcare reform law] was probably not to penalize marriage and take millions of people off the tax rolls, it will be the result,” the report says.
Married couples will receive only 14 percent of the law’s tax credits, while Obamacare’s tax provisions allow 7.4 million to 8.1 million mostly single people to avoid paying any income taxes at all, the report says.
Less than 2 million of the country’s 60 million couples will benefit from the law’s insurance subsidies. “Almost half of the beneficiaries of the tax credit will be unmarried individuals without dependent children,” the study says.
The report cites two main provisions of the law that hurt married couples:
First, the subsidies are connected to the federal poverty level, which doesn’t increase proportionally with household size. Second, the law provides insurance subsidies for workers whose employers don’t offer affordable coverage.
But proposed rules tie that affordability to individual rather than family coverage. So workers wouldn’t be able to receive subsidies on family coverage if they were offered affordable individual coverage, even if they couldn’t afford the employer’s family coverage.
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.