Should you bother signing up for subsidized Affordable Care Act health insurance through the state or federal government-run "marketplaces" this year? Or if you signed up for it last year, should you consider cancelling your coverage this year before you get hit with higher bills if you just let your current coverage roll over?

Believe it or not, when it comes to Obamacare, you might find yourself a lot better off if you choose to not to pay the premiums for your health insurance and pay the "penalty" tax instead! Or perhaps consider more affordable alternatives that will help you avoid paying any tax altogether.

In setting up the its system for mandating that all Americans have health insurance, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which is more popularly known as Obamacare, actually creates some really perverse incentives that may make it more desirable for people to dump their health insurance coverage instead. At least, until they might actually need to have it.

You see, Obamacare actually mandates that Americans who aren't covered by their employer's health insurance either choose to buy costly policies on their state's newly established health insurance exchanges and perhaps benefit from a tax credit subsidy to do so, or choose to "self-insure" and pay a potentially much less costly tax instead.

Here's how the self-insurance part of that works. Because the Affordable Care Act prohibits health insurance providers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, healthy people can choose to go without any coverage and only buy it if they actually need to during the next enrollment period. If the amount of any penalty tax they have is considerably less than the cost of the health insurance they might otherwise choose to buy, they might have a powerful incentive to do just that.

For healthy Americans, the self-insurance aspect of their choice would mean that they would simply pay out of pocket for the health care they actually consume - just the same as those covered by health insurance will do through the co-pays and deductibles for the low quality coverage they have available to them. And while you might be surprised at how inexpensive medical care can be if health insurance is not involved, even for major surgical procedures, the real challenge would come if they suddenly find themselves faced with health care costs that are considerably higher than what they might be able to pay out of pocket using their income, savings and credit accounts.

In the worst case scenario, they might have to pay their health care provider out of pocket during the maximum 90-day limit that the law mandates health insurers to provide coverage after they enroll. But they will still be able to get insurance coverage, and if the incentive to drop it remains after they no longer need it, they are free to choose to do so, because the law permits it and because as honest taxpayers, they cannot be denied their right to get health insurance coverage if and when they might choose otherwise.

Some might say that these Americans are wasting money on taxes that they could be using to buy insurance instead. But then, those people are ignoring that healthy people can go many years without needing any more than basic, low-cost health care, and that in the year where might might first need health insurance coverage, any tax they might have to pay would be pro-rated for the portion of the year they went without any coverage, reducing any potential waste to a minimum. And then, there are those more affordable alternatives that could even make Obamacare's income tax liability go away altogether.

Our tool below is the first that's designed to help Americans find out which option under the Obamacare law, paying a premium or the penalty tax, specifically is better for them, which we've updated for the latest enrollment period for insurance coverage starting in the next year. To get started, you will need to get the health insurance coverage cost data that applies for your region, which you can get from either Healthcare.gov, assuming it works, or to a more reliable and transparent health insurance shopping site, such as TheHealthSherpa.com to find out how much the plans that will be available on your region's health insurance exchange may cost you.

In doing that, we'll need you to identify the monthly premiums associated with three of the plans that will be available to you: the second-lowest cost "Silver" plan, which is used to find out how much of a tax credit subsidy you might receive, the monthly premium of the lowest cost "Bronze" plan, which sets a limit for how much you might have to pay in Obamacare taxes, and the monthly premium for the plan you would actually consider purchasing.

Also, if you're accessing this tool on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you'll want to click here to access a working version of our tool.

As a bonus, we've also made the tool capable of considering how much your Obamacare income tax might be if the tax rates that will be fully implemented in 2016 were in force today.

One Final Note

The man in the video below, who happens to be the main architect of Obamacare's super convoluted tax and subsidy scheme and who deliberately tried to either deceive or confuse honest Americans into supporting the Affordable Care Act, appears to think that you're too stupid to do this kind of math for yourself. Especially if you supported the law.

We're very happy to make the math easy to do!

About This Tool

In building this tool, we've made a handful of assumptions. Here they are, along with links to our references for data:

• The federal government's poverty income thresholds for 2013 will initially apply in 2014.
• The Kaiser Family Foundation's description of how Obamacare's subsides will be calculated is accurate.
• The map of states we used to identify which are expanding their eligibility for their Medicaid programs up to 138% of the federal poverty income threshold and which are not is largely accurate. For states that had not made their determination as 1 September 2013, we've assumed that they are not expanding their Medicaid program's eligibility. We will update this periodically as new information becomes available.
• CNNMoney's description of how the penalty tax will work is accurate. Update 20 September 2013: Our thanks to Sean Parnell of The Self-Pay Patient blog, who identifies an exemption from the tax that we originally missed - it turns out that people who live in regions where the lowest-cost Bronze plan is more than 8% of their household income even after the subsidy will be fully exempt from the tax! (Of course, you realize that means that skipping out on not paying health insurance too until they might actually need it just became an even more attractive option for those who will be fully exempt from the tax!)
• The default values associated with selecting the "United States" are those that will apply for a majority of the nation's population.
• People will mostly act rationally where their financial incentives and the assessment of their health care needs are involved.

Beyond this, we've assumed that for some people there may be a "gray area", who would only have a small incentive to not purchase health insurance, where any benefit in doing so is not very large with respect to their household income, and where the decision to buy or not buy should instead be based upon an assessment of what the buyer's actual health care needs for their household will be in the near term, rather than purely upon its cost with respect to the Obamacare income tax.

Mathematically, we've defined that gray area as being equal to the difference between the penalty tax they might choose to pay or an amount equal to 3.1% of their income before taxes, which closely corresponds to the average expenditure of U.S. households for health insurance, according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey report for 2012.

Legal Disclaimer

Materials on this website are published by Political Calculations to provide visitors with free information and insights regarding the incentives created by the laws and policies described. However, this website is not designed for the purpose of providing legal, medical or financial advice to individuals. Visitors should not rely upon information on this website as a substitute for personal legal, medical or financial advice. While we make every effort to provide accurate website information, laws can change and inaccuracies happen despite our best efforts. If you have an individual problem, you should seek advice from a licensed professional in your state, i.e., by a competent authority with specialized knowledge who can apply it to the particular circumstances of your case.