CNSNews.com, an openly right-wing news site, recently ran calculations on the effects of the Affordable Care Act (referred to in the news piece as “Obamacare”) on married couples and found some interesting information that could benefit divorced couples.
As a site that specializes in cheap divorce and helping you through the process of how to file for divorce and how to survive its effects and move on with your life, we’re less interested in getting in to the debate over whether ACA is good or bad and more interested in helping you see how it can affect your dissolution.
With that said, it’s worth sharing what CNSNews found after running some calculations on the “Obamacare calculator” over at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
‘Divorce Incentives’
Writer Hans Bader used the pro-ACA Kaiser calculator to determine divorced and unmarried couples “could save $7,230 per year if you are a fairly typical 40-year-old couple with kids (example: the husband working full-time, and the wife working part time, with the husband making $70,000, and the wife making $23,000),” he writes.
Bader continues: “If you are a 60-year-old couple with equal incomes and no kids, and you make $62,041 a year, you save $11,028 a year by getting divorced or remaining unmarried. These are the amounts of money you will lose if you get married, since you will lose this amount of taxpayer subsidies due to Obamacare’s discriminatory treatment of married versus unmarried couples.”
One Particular Winner With ACA
Of course, all of this comes as little surprise to people, who understand the nature of legislation. Whenever something changes, it typically does so to fix things for one group while it can have unwelcome consequences for others.
In addition to divorcees in general, ACA will actually be a boon to many women, who lose their health care coverage in the wake of divorce, notes private wealth adviser Judy Resnick of the Johnston, Resnick, Mittman Group, in comments to MarketWatch.
“It gives the non-working spouse the freedom to move on and not worry about their health … It will take one of the fears out of divorcing—I think it’s huge.”
If you and your spouse decide to go the do it yourself divorce route, then you could be in a great position to save money now and later with implementation of ACA, but to be sure, you should run the calculations yourself over at the Kaiser Foundation. Here’s the link.