奥巴马医改对婚姻的隐性惩罚_BEC初级作文

奥巴马医改对婚姻的隐性惩罚

Married people who are uninsured make up just a small fraction of the uninsured, for obvious reasons: It is easier to be insured if you have two potential pathways of getting there. Only 15.4 percent of married people were uninsured 2017, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation; the uninsurance rate for "single adults living together" was more than twice as high—33.4 percent.

That may be one reason the Obamacare subsides are more generous to single people and one- or two-parent families with children in the house than to couples who lack children. They were designed to help single moms and struggling middle-class families with children, not married creative-class millennials in pricey cities who have not yet settled into well-paid work, or barring that, work for a single employer.

Health insurance isn't the only place where there's a marriage penalty. The federal income tax also hits married couples with similar earnings harder than couples with one main breadwinner.

"In the tax code, you have a different set of tax rates for married couples that mitigates the marriage penalty to some degree," says Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has been writing about the marriage penalty in health reform since 2010. Under Obamacare, however, there are "dramatic" penalties that are "substantial—particularly with couples in the upper age range," he says.

"What you are doing is saying ... you have to pay a penalty of multiple hundreds of dollars—a substantial portion of your income—to stay married," Rector says. "It's saying society is basically hostile to the institution of marriage."