Under Obamacare, It's Cheaper to Be Divorced Than Married

Why are you still married?  Obama wants you to get a divorce . . .

Many couples buying insurance through the Obamacare exchanges will face huge premium increases if they choose to get married, according to a tool created by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s because jointly they’ll lose substantial tax credits or subsidies they were eligible for individually.

The Kaiser calculator reveals that a married couple of 64-year-olds earning a combined $62,081 a year (each earning the same salary) would pay a premium of $15,211 for a “silver” plan under Obamacare. That amounts to more than a quarter of their income (and an even larger portion after taxes). If they chose not to marry (or to get divorced if they were already married), however, they’d pay only $5,360 combined for the same coverage. That’s a marriage penalty (or divorce incentive) of nearly $10,000 a year.

The story isn’t much better for a couple of 40-year-olds, one earning $70,000 a year and the other earning $23,000 a year. If married with two children, they would pay a premium of $9,700. If they chose not to marry (or to get divorced), however, they’d pay only $3,700 combined for the same coverage. That’s a marriage penalty (or divorce incentive) of $6,000 a year. By the time their children were 18, that would add up to well over $100,000 they could have saved to send them to college. (Tom Blumer at PJ Media highlighted similarly troubling scenarios before Kaiser adjusted its calculator.)

It was Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation who first pointed out the “wedding tax” in Obamacare. That was back in January 2010 before the bill became law. Rector warned that “the bill’s anti-marriage penalties occur because of the income counting and benefit structure rules of the bill. If a two-earner couple is married, the bill counts their income jointly; since the joint income will be higher, a married couple’s health care subsidies would be lower.”

Nearly four years later as Americans log on to the exchange websites to sign up for Obamacare, many couples are discovering this unpleasant consequence for the first time. This week Al Jazeera talked to an Obamacare “navigator” in Colorado who said so far “no one” she’d talked to had signed up for coverage. “Thus far everybody has taken a look at the rates and they've walked out the door,” she said. “There's sticker shock. They just can't afford it.”

It’s a perverse law that would take such a sticker-shocked couple and tell them they could save $5,000, $7,000, even upward of $10,000 a year if they simply got divorced. At a time when nearly two in five children nationwide are born to parents who are not married to each other, this is no small problem.

This anti-marriage, pro-divorce provision needs to be changed before January 1. It should never go into effect.