Health insurance

[Shrike44]

I just want people to be aware of what is happening to some of Targets’ TMs. It was a great gesture on Targets’ part to reduce the average hourly requirement to 24.9 hrs/ week. But here is the problem. I’ve been benefiting from tax credits for my health insurance gotten in the Marketplace. This yr I had to pay $.00 for one of their Bronze plans. But come April 1 I qualify for Target health insurance. This disqualifies my wife and I from receiving tax credits. I wouldn’t mind but my wife also works at Target and missed qualifying by 1/2 hr on average. So we are forced with paying a higher premium for the lowest premium plan offered to us. So now we have to pay on average $ 266/ month for a plan that is not as good as the one we had. That’s 9% of our income after taxes. It would have been great if we would have been given heads up from Target to plan ahead. Targets Pay and Benefits division wouldn’t even consider overriding my wife’s’ denial of coverage because of being so close to reaching the required hourly average. It would have at least brought our premium cost to an average of $118/ month. This has put us in quite a pickle. I know this is going to effect a lot of TMs. Some may be forced to go without health insurance because they can’t afford it. I wanted to at least let those who made this decision know the repercussions of this decision. So this is our reward for our 5 yrs of service to Target. I did file a complaint with the Integrity hotline and await a call back. If anyone knows anything else we can do to make our complaint heard, please let us know! Thanks!

 

[FlowTeamChick]

No solution to offer, but this reminds me of back when the ACA first went into effect and I was bumped out of being eligible for Target's health care savings account plan by about the same average hours per week. This was before my state expanded Medicaid so it left me in the lurch and I ended up going without any health insurance and paying the tax penalty in effect at the time.
There's never going to be something in place that will make everyone happy, even universal health care, contrary to what ardent advocates for it say. (Talk to people in Canada or the U.K. about their experiences with their national plans - good in many ways, but definitely not perfect.)

 

[jackandcat]

A big flaw in the ACA: in some cases, people who receive health benefits from their employer end up paying more than those on subsidized Marketplace plans.

I am one of those in a similar situation, where as of April 1st my wife and I will be on Target's plan (though we chose the higher-cost HRA given our estimated health-care usage). We'll be tightening our spending a lot on everything non-essential, and focus on increasing our income (possibly with me changing employers).

 

[Psyfire]

There's also the problem of people who weren't aware they were eligible due to this new change and will have to repay the IRS a set amount, most of it taken out of their refund. It happened to me last year and it will this year because its actually cheaper to pay the IRS back and stay on my health insurance until April than staying on but with no subsidiaries.