Article – Major Blow to Obamacare Mandate: IRS Won’t Reject Tax Returns That Don’t Answer Health Insurance Question

This is extremely interesting:

The health law’s individual mandate requires everyone to either maintain qualifying health coverage or pay a tax penalty, known as a “shared responsibility payment.” The IRS was set to require filers to indicate whether they had maintained coverage in 2016 or paid the penalty by filling out line 61 on their form 1040s. Alternatively, they could claim exemption from the mandate by filing a form 8965.

For most filers, filling out line 61 would be mandatory. The IRS would not accept 1040s unless the coverage box was checked, or the shared responsibility payment noted, or the exemption form included. Otherwise they would be labeled “silent returns” and rejected.

Instead, however, filling out that line will be optional.

If this is true, and if I’m reading it right, (two big ‘if’s) you can choose not to have health insurance and you won”t be penalized because you won’t have to tell the .gov that you are without it. I gotta tell ya, if that is actually the case then that’s pretty much all the reason I needed to vote for him right there.

As always, you have to take these things with a grain of salt, but if it’s true then it is a very nice way to get around that onerous and, to me, authority-overstepping ‘mandate’ that you must have health insurance.

4 thoughts on “Article – Major Blow to Obamacare Mandate: IRS Won’t Reject Tax Returns That Don’t Answer Health Insurance Question

  1. A friend who is a police officer once told me 1: admit nothing 2 deny everything 3 make them prove it in court. Good advice.

  2. So let me get this straight.

    You don’t have to report, therefore you don’t have to pay the penalty.

    Per the law, you can still get health insurance for a pre-existing condition.

    So, without penalty, you can wait until after you need health insurance to buy it.

    Cue the system-wide collapse of Obamacare in 3….2….1….

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