Obamacare Subsidies Act Like an Effective Marginal Tax of About 15 Percent as Your Income Goes Up


Atrios:

Something I’m looking for and not finding is an estimate of the effective marginal tax rates on people in the exchanges who are eligible for subsidies. A problem with means-testing programs is that as you earn more income, your benefits go away, meaning that effectively you’re paying a pretty high tax on each additional dollar earned. Your company giveth, and Uncle Sam taketh away.

That got me curious. The subsidies are calculated so that you never have to pay more than a certain percentage of your income in health premiums. That percentage rises with income according to a formula, so it’s pretty easy to figure out the subsidy at different income levels and then calculate the effective marginal tax rate caused by the fact that the subsidy level goes down.

I used the Kaiser subsidy calculator to get the subsidy for a family of three at various income levels. (The exact subsidy level varies depending on family size, but this provides a pretty good estimate for an average family.) As you can see, as you gain more income, you get less subsidy, which produces an effective marginal tax rate of 12-16 percent at most income levels. When your income gets high enough, the subsidies are so low that there isn’t much left to lose, so the effective marginal rate goes down. At 400 percent of the poverty level, the subsidies decline to zero.

The moral of this story, of course, is that you should avoid means testing if you can, since it provides a negative incentive to earn more money. Unfortunately, means testing is often the only practical way of providing benefits to the poor, so we put up with it even though everyone agrees it’s suboptimal. However, in the case of health care we could solve this problem easily by simply adopting a national health care plan that provided coverage for everyone at no charge. Since it’s a flat benefit, it wouldn’t distort work incentives. Taxes would have to go up to pay for this, of course, but those taxes would almost certainly produce less distortion at low income levels than Obamacare does.

Someday we might have a sensible system like that. Someday.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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