Some More re Obamacare

The Wall Street Journal provided an interactive and a graph earlier this week in their online issue.

The Healthcare.gov Explorer, available here, allows you to quickly explore the highlights of what’s available in your county.  As I’ve mentioned before, what I can get in my little county in Texas would be vastly more expensive in terms of premiums required and deductibles to be paid by me before the health plan would begin to pay (only) some of my expenses, were I to have to replace what my wife’s employer provides due to the employer’s decision to cancel its program.

This (these) graph(s) shows the subsidies you’re paying, both in terms of additional Obamacare taxes and in terms of those higher premiums and deductibles in order to pay for someone else’s health plan.  I’ve broken the WSJ‘s single image into two parts for convenience.  Keep in mind that the example presented is for a single person (and for that person living in Ohio).  The first part gives the basis for subsidy calculations:

This second part gives the additional subsidies that are available under Obamacare:

I’ve written elsewhere about the poverty trap that is government welfare, and the rational nature of the economic decision to stay on welfare rather than take a wage increase which is that trap.  Here, we see that a person making $11,490 (a student, perhaps) who graduates and takes an entry-level job at $28,725 will see his health plan out-of-pocket costs skyrocket from $1,000/yr to $5,000 and his $100 deductible go to $1,500.  He’ll also see his monthly premium (heroically assuming that the two plans in these two graphs have identical premiums, but you get the idea) increase by $1,212 per year.  The total health plan cost increase of $6,612 per year represents nearly 40% of that wage increase—and this is before considering the other welfare subsidies which this man also loses from that wage increase.

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