Two Colorado lawmakers want to create a new state tax credit that would be available to individuals who end up paying federal penalties for going without health insurance.
Coming amid some chaos for consumers with cancelled plans and for others having difficulty enrolling through insurance exchanges, the proposal is laid out in a bill called the Healthcare Liberty Act, sponsored by Republican representatives Dan Nordberg of Colorado Springs and Jared Wright of Fruita.
The bill would create a new state tax credit that essentially reimburses the amount individuals facing the individual mandate have to pay to the Internal Revenue Service, $95 or 1 percent of household income in 2014 and then $695 or 2.5 percent of household income in 2016 and beyond.
It is one of the most creative ideas devised by lawmakers trying to challenge the Affordable Care Act or diminish its impact, offering an incentive through tax credits to counter a tax disincentive, the individual mandate penalty.
While the bill is unlikely to get much consideration in the Democratic-controlled legislature or by Gov. John Hickenlooper, it's still a sign of some public discontent with the ACA, or at least parts of it and at least in the early days of health reform as the signature program for expanding coverage is still struggling to function across 50 states.
Colorado's state-run insurance exchange, Connect for Health Colorado, seems to have avoided the persisting website problems of other public exchanges, although there were some recent problems with the Medicaid application that left some consumers with a large lag time in verifying eligibility and it's going to take a lot of December enrollments to help meet the low end of initial projections.
While more than 114,000 Coloradans have successfully enrolled in Medicaid through the exchange, only some 23,000 are set to be covered in private plans as of December 14 -- for now short of the 36,700 minimum exchange officials projected enrolling by the end of the year.
The exchange's rollout has coincided with an estimated 250,000 health plans being cancelled (in a state of just over 5 million) and with some sticker shock at the new plans in some places. With significant variations in pricing across countries and complaints of high prices from residents in Garfield County, on Colorado's western slope, Insurance Commissioner Marguerite Salazar is mulling changing the county's designation and removing its status as a resort area, which covers three neighboring counties, including Pitkin, home to Aspen.
All of those issues have combined to leave many conservatives in states like Colorado still looking for opportunities to offset or stop parts of the ACA.
"Many Colorado families are relying on us as their elected representatives to try to mitigate the adverse impacts of Obamacare," said Jared Wright, the lawmaker sponsoring the tax credit bill, in a media release.
"Our bill is an appropriate response to the tax penalty and will help people in Colorado who simply cannot afford this expensive new government health insurance mandate."