Originally Posted by
Emily's Cat
It's not exactly a straight-forward calculation. I don't really fault anyone for getting it wrong. But hey - if he thinks it's going to be a $5000 penalty, then he's more likely to buy insurance. It'll likely be in his best interests in the long run. And if he lives in my state, there's some small chance it might benefit my company
If you were without healthcare for the whole year, it is a fairly straightforward calculation.
You either are charged 2.5% of your AGI ($1200 for a person with an AGI of $48000) up to the value of the average bronze plan.
OR you are charged on a per person basis - $695 per adult and $347.50 for each child not to exceed $2085.
You get charged whichever value is higher. So based on this person's income, the absolute worst case scenario is $2085.
If you were only without healthcare for part of the year, you take that value and multiply it by X/12 where X is the number of months you were without insurance (granted it gets a bit more complicated if different people in the household were without insurance for different periods of time).