By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
About 24 million Americans signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchange for 2025. But some changes proposed by the Republican tax bill could see millions of Americans kicked off of its roles. Here with more we’ve got Yahoo Finance senior reporter, Jordan Weisman. Jordan, what are some of the changes that are coming for Obamacare?
00:29 Jordan Weisman
Uh there are handful and you know frankly a lot of them sound a little bit technical, a little bit complicated, but collectively they could have a fairly big impact. Um one of the ones people are going to most notice is you will not be able to automatically re-enroll in your coverage anymore. Um instead you’re going to have to verify your income, your residents, um how many people in your household every single year if you want to re-up your coverage. Uh one of the reasons for this or maybe the biggest reason behind this, is that Republicans say it’s necessary to combat um a rash of fraud on the Obamacare exchanges. Um there’s been this known issue with insurance brokers signing people up for coverage they may not even know about or changing their plans in order to essentially score a commission. Um and there have been some DOJ cases around that. It’s been a sort of uh ongoing problem. People debate the extent of it, but Republicans are making a big number of changes basically under the, you know, under the some say it’s a pretense but for the um in order to combat these kinds of frauds.
02:09 Speaker A
So if the tax bill passes as is, how will this affect Americans?
02:20 Jordan Weisman
Well again, it’s going to be a lot harder to it’s going to be a little bit more difficult to sign up for coverage, right? They’re going to be more hoops to jump through. Um things like no longer being able to automatically renew. If you’re low income you won’t be able to sign up at any point during the year. You’ll have to do it during open enrollment. It could get a little trickier to sign up if you lose a job um and then need to find coverage. Um there are also going to be some potential financial traps. Uh currently the way Obamacare works, it’s a little bit complicated, you might have heard. But when you sign up you have to go and essentially guess your income for the coming year. You have to predict how much you are going to make and that determines how much the government is going to give you in terms of subsidies. Um if you guess wrong, if you underestimate your income, uh you have to pay back some of those subsidies. Uh the way that currently works is there’s a cap on it, so there’s a limit on how much you can end up on the hook for. Republicans want to eliminate those caps and that’s a complicated way of saying that a lot of people could end up with a big tax bill at the end of the year they might not be expecting. Again, this is part of this push to deal with purported fraud, um but Democratic critics are concerned this is going to end up penalizing a lot of people who just sort of innocently uh you know, guess wrong when they try to figure out how much they’re going to make. People whose incomes vary a lot during the years, like Uber drivers for instance, uh people who own their own businesses where revenues might just kind of go up and down.
04:17 Speaker A
Jordan, thanks so much for taking the time breaking this down. We’re going to be tracking the bill very closely.
04:26 Jordan Weisman
Thanks for having me.