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April 10, 2015 at 03:00 AM
A LifeHealthPro measure of the consumer tax trauma inflicted by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) shows the level of pain may be staying about the same, or falling slightly.
The staff of LifeHealthPro computes the measure, the PPACA 1095-A tax pain index, by searching three major Web-based tax forums for the terms 1095, 1095-A and 1040. We then divide the sum of the number of threads referring to 1095 and 1095-A that were started during the previous week by the number of new threads referring to 1040.
The “pain index” fell to 11 percent during the week ending April 8, down from 13 percent during the week ending April 1 and rising from 12 percent in mid-March.
This is an informal measure, and we have not computed a standard of deviation. Small changes may be the result of random fluctuations rather than an underlying change in confusion about 1095-A forms.
Users of the forums included — the Intuit TurboTax forum, H&R Block’s Community forum, and TheTaxBook.com readers’ forum — started 79 threads about 1095 or 1095-A forms during the week ending April 8 and 728 threads about 1040 forms.
The number 1040 threads fell 2 percent, and the number of 1095 threads fell 20 percent, to 79, from 99.
