Health Care Reform Penalizes Married Couples, Says Report (The Hill)

A new report identifies a whole suite of tax issues tied to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, many of them potentially crippling for married couples. The report, from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, concludes that married couples will get only 14 percent of the law’s tax credits, while more than 7 million mostly single people will stop paying income taxes altogether.

There are two primary reasons, the report states: one, the subsidies are tied to the federal poverty level, which does not increase proportionally along with household size; two, subsidies are offered only for individual coverage, which means employees may prefer to go without coverage at work in order to get less expensive family coverage in the new health insurance exchanges, thus increasing federal health care spending.