Are you a health care worker? We’d love to hear from you. Email editor at northcarolinahealthnews.org
By Alvin Tran
Kaiser Health News
Low-income North Carolinians who do not qualify for Medicaid come January 2014 will not face penalties if they fail to buy insurance next year.
That’s according to a final rule on exemptions to the health law’s individual mandate – the law’s controversial requirement that most Americans have health coverage or pay a penalty in 2014. That rule was published last week.
The health law calls for an expansion of Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for low-income Americans, by making it available to people up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which for individuals is $15,856 in 2013, and providing new federal funding to cover the costs for the first three years, and no less than 90 percent after that. But the Supreme Court ruled last year that states could not be forced to join in that program. About half the states so far have opted against the expansion, a concern for supporters of the law because it could leave millions of people without access to affordable coverage.
Governor Pat McCrory signed legislation in March rejecting the Medicaid expansion, which would have covered an additional 500,000, according to the North Carolina Institute of Medicine.
The law provides subsidies to help low-income people, but they are available only to those who earn between 100 ($11,490 for an individual) and 400 percent of the poverty level ($45,960 for an individual). Individuals and families earning less than 100 percent who live in states not expanding Medicaid have few, if any, options for affordable insurance.
The final rule is similar to draft proposals from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Treasury in January.
Those who do not have health coverage, and who do not meet the criteria for exemptions, must pay the penalty at the end of the tax year. The penalty for the first year is $95 per adult and $47.50 per child, or 1 percent of family income, whichever is greater, and it increases over time.
Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Additional reporting by Rose Hoban
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You are free to use NC Health News content under the following conditions: You can copy and paste this html tracking code into articles of ours that you use, this little snippet of code allows us to track how many people read our story. Please do not reprint our stories without our bylines, and please include a live link to NC Health News under the byline, like this: By Jane Doe North Carolina Health News Finally, at the bottom of the story (whether web or print), please include the text: North Carolina Health News is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina. Visit NCHN at northcarolinahealthnews.org. (on the web, this can be hyperlinked)