Most Recent Posts

We're heading into the home stretch to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act this year. The open enrollment period ends March 31 for most people.

But there are exceptions. And they are the subject of many of our questions this month.

For example, Diane Jennings of Hickory, N.C., has a question about her young adult daughter, who's currently covered on her father's health insurance. "When she ages out of the program this year at 26, in October," Jennings asks, "she'll have to get her own insurance through the exchange. But as she [will have] missed the deadline of March 2014, will she have to pay a penalty?"

There shouldn't be any penalty. Turning 26 is one of those life changes that allows you to buy insurance from the health exchange outside the normal open enrollment period. In this case, since the daughter knows when this will happen, she can make the switch in advance; you can sign up as many as 60 days before you'll need coverage.

This is a function the federal government just recently added to the Healthcare.gov website. When you log into your account there's a new button that's marked 'report a life change.' You click on that button and it should guide you through the process.

Kaitlyn Grana of Los Angeles is also a young adult on a parent's plan – her mother's. She and her husband are expecting a baby in June. Her husband has insurance through his employer. But, she says, "He doesn't really love his insurance, so we're thinking about covering baby through Covered California," the state-run exchange. "My question is, how soon do we need to do this, and what options are available to us?"

We have several questions from young women on their parents' plans who are pregnant. And it's important to know is that while the health law requires that employer health plans cover their workers' young-adult children, that requirement does not extend to their children's children (although a few state laws require it). So Kaitlyn won't be able to get her new baby covered through her mother's plan.

“ While the health law requires that employer health plans cover their workers' young-adult children up to age 26, that requirement does not extend to their children's children.

A few times a year, the Treasury Department publishes a long list of names announcing all of the Americans who have lately abandoned their U.S. citizenship.

According to the legal website International Tax Blog, the number hovered around 500 a decade ago. Last year, it hit a record high of nearly 3,000.

This was not a gradual change. It was a sudden spike. It's a story of dominoes falling, one after another, leading to an unexpected outcome.

The first domino fell in 2008, when federal prosecutors accused the Swiss bank UBS of helping wealthy Americans hide their money tax-free in overseas accounts. It was a big case, leading to indictments, fines and prison time.

The U.S. Congress wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. During the economic recession, lawmakers saw a chance to bring in massive sums of money and stop tax cheats at the same time.

"They just found UBS in a terrible scheme to encourage tax evasion," Barney Frank, the Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, told NPR in 2009. "I think there are clearly tens of billions that can be recovered there."

The next year, in 2010, Congress passed the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act. The law affects every foreign bank that does business with the U.S. And not just banks: It also applies to retirement accounts, mutual funds, and more.

Renouncing citizenship is not as easy as throwing a passport onto the fire. It's a lengthy process, involving interviews, paperwork and legal procedures. So people who do it generally have a compelling motivation. And while individual reasons for renouncing may vary from person to person, experts in the field say the recent dramatic spike has more to do with the 2010 tax law than any other factor.

Wisconsin financial adviser David Kuenzi works with Americans overseas who are affected by the law.

"[Congress] said to all of these institutions, 'You need to follow this set of criteria to determine all of the Americans who are your clients," says Kuenzi, "and you need to report directly to us on their holdings.' "

Shut Out Of Foreign Banks

Foreign banks looked at the new law and decided that the regulations would be a huge hassle. Many of them decided to wash their hands of American account-holders.

"They canceled the accounts of just about every American in Europe," says retiree John Mainwaring, "including me."

Seventy-year-old Mainwaring grew up in Ohio, served in the U.S. Army, and has lived in Munich, Germany, for about 40 years.

After his old German banks kicked him out, he tried to find new ones that would take him in.

"I went everywhere," he says, "to every bank in Germany. The problem is, the ones here don't deal with Americans."

Congress wanted to catch tax cheats. But the net also snagged Americans whose foreign bank accounts let them pay their bills in the countries they now call home.

U.S. Taxes Americans, No Matter Where They Live

The United States is very unusual in this respect. Most countries in the world don't tax their citizens living abroad. So, for example, a Spaniard living in Canada won't pay Spanish taxes. Instead, he'll pay Canadian taxes. But the U.S. taxes American citizens wherever they are in the world.

"If I can compare it to romance, I say the U.S. is like Fatal Attraction," says Suzanne Reisman, a lawyer in London who advises Americans abroad. "Once they've got you, they never let you go. You have to renounce your citizenship, or you have to die."

So today, Americans who don't like the Fatal Attraction relationship are giving up their U.S. citizenship in record numbers.

In Switzerland, so many people want to renounce their citizenship that the U.S. Embassy actually has a waiting list.

"I want to be clear: It's not about a dollar value of taxes that I don't want to pay," says Brian Dublin, a businessman who lives near Zurich. "It's about the headache associated with the regulations, filing in the U.S., and then having financial institutions in the rest of the world turn me away."

Dublin says he is ready to renounce, despite the ties he feels to the country of his birth. "I grew up in America. I love my country. But I just feel that the current regulations are onerous."

Officials from the Treasury Department, the State Department, the IRS and Congress spoke on background for this story. None would talk on tape.

They all generally agree on the facts of the situation. Even so, there is very little pressure to change it. As one Senate staffer pointed out, nobody in Congress represents overseas Americans. And government officials think this law is succeeding at catching the tax cheats. That may be worth the side effect of losing a few thousand American citizens every year.

One of Bitcoin's largest trading exchanges shut down Tuesday, and you probably couldn't care less.

So what if rumors are circulating that millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin are stolen? If you don't understand Bitcoin in the first place, it's hard to figure out why this matters. So we're using this as an opportunity to go back to the basics: what this b-word means, where it came from and why it just might matter.

The Birth Of Bitcoin

This is the stuff of a Dan Brown novel.

Bitcoin emerged from the work of Satoshi Nakamoto. The hook is, no one actually knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. (It's inaccurate, of course to say "no one," but the people who do know aren't talking.) In 2008, he/she/they released a detailed concept for a self-regulating crypto-currency, wrote a whole bunch of incredible code to support it. Satoshi Nakamoto stopped responding to emails in 2011. It's been a wild goose chase ever since.

Satoshi Nakamoto's concept is that of a democratically organized currency: no government regulation, no centralized bank. It's been embraced by, among others, libertarians trying to undermine monetary regulation policies and entrepreneurs trying to avoid financial corruption in developing countries.

While it's a difficult concept to grasp — we'll get to that in a second — it's worth at least getting familiar with because Bitcoin will continue to be covered regardless of whether the media understands it, says Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

"It's the perfect story. It has the mysterious background, started by a pseudonymous character," he says. "As humans, we like to dream about how things could be different. ... I think that for many people Bitcoin allows them to dream those dreams."

Not to mention, there's a lot of money involved. After all, it fundamentally is about money. Think of this as a Hollywood "inspired by a true story" blockbuster waiting to happen.

We recommend: Motherboard's Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto, The Creator Of Bitcoin?

OK, I'm Hooked. So What Is It?

In the great words of Shrek, Bitcoin is like an onion: It has layers. At its most superficial, it's a virtual currency, allowing you to transfer money to other people anywhere in the world without any physical exchange of dollar bills — just as you can with, say, PayPal or online credit card payments.

But the system behind it is much different. There's no central organization, like a bank or government treasury, organizing and keeping track of it. The bookkeeping is completely decentralized and is supposedly impossible to bamboozle, the way a bank could cook its books without anyone else looking. There's no intrinsic value, the way you could make a necklace out of gold, or government backing, the way modern "fiat" money has. And it's completely anonymous — you never have to give anyone your name or Social Security number or credit card number.

The whole process is made much more complicated by the technical aspects of how it works on a molecular level. There's lot of encryption and computational power involved. I don't pretend to be an expert in it, so I'll refer you to the source: Satoshi Nakamoto's original whitepaper.

We recommend: Medium's Explain Bitcoin Like I'm Five and, once you've mastered that, Quartz's By reading this article, you're mining bitcoins. If you want to delve into the murky world of Bitcoin mining, check out the New York Times' Into The Bitcoin Mines.

Trials, Tribulation

Ready for more of the Hollywood blockbuster plot line? Bitcoin's intrinsic anonymity makes it a prime currency for shady dealings. A Texas man who allegedly ran a Ponzi scheme used Bitcoin. An online black market called Silk Road, which the FBI shut down in October, used Bitcoin.

Silk Road got back into business shortly after, but earlier this month, hackers allegedly exploited a Bitcoin glitch to steal millions from customers. The value of Bitcoin fluctuates wildly, at one point dropping from $1,200 to less than $600 per coin after the Chinese government denounced it.

On top of all these, the failure of one of its largest exchanges, MtGox, led some to speculate that this would ruin Bitcoin's legitimacy for good. But William Luther, an economics professor at Kenyon University in Ohio, says this might actually help Bitcoin in the long run because it forces people away from this first-generation business to more sophisticated exchanges.

"Now there will be an air of professionalism surrounding Bitcoin that wasn't there before," Luther says.

Bitcoin is also accepted by a growing number of businesses — including Overstock.com, two casinos in Las Vegas and a Subway sandwich shop in Allentown, Pa. Overstock's executive vice chairman, Jonathan Johnson, says the MtGox news won't affect whether the company continues to accept the currency.

In fact, he says, Bitcoin has been great for business. It brings in new customers and prevents online shopping fraud. And Overstock converts bitcoins to dollars immediately after payment, so the fluctuations don't really affect the company.

It also has cut Overstock's credit card transaction fees, Johnson says. That's a benefit that could very well appeal to everyday consumers, too.

We recommend: NPR reporter Alan Yu's How Virtual Currency Could Make It Easier To Move Money

The Bigger Benefit

This stumbling and growing revolution has done something remarkable: In order to truly wrap your head around the concept, you are forced to contemplate how money works.

Is assigning value to a piece of paper any different than assigning value to encrypted electronic signals? Can we have a sustainable currency without the backing of powerful people assuring us that our money's good? Are there ways to secure money outside of banks?

Luther, the economics professor, calls himself a "Bitcoin skeptic" — he's not convinced it will last — but he says questions like these are worth the ride.

"Bitcoin has brought the question of alternative currencies back to the table, and I think that's a good thing," he says. "Money is a very old concept, and it's difficult for me to think that there's not a better way to make transactions."

In a scene from the new season of the popular Netflix political drama House of Cards, the elegant Claire Underwood catches her soon-to-be vice president husband puffing an e-cigarette.

"You're cheating," she says, referring to their efforts to quit smoking.

"No, I'm not," Congressman Francis Underwood replies. "It's vapor....addiction without the consequences."

A Washington-based drama with an implicit endorsement of "vaping" – the practice of partaking in nicotine without burning tobacco?

It could have been ripped directly from the playbook of lobbyists working Capitol Hill and Washington regulators on behalf of the estimated $1.7 billion-and-growing e-cigarette industry.

Eric Criss of the Electronic Cigarette Industry Group (ECIG), laughs off the suggestion that his Florida-based organization, which recently opened a lobbying office in suburban Washington, orchestrated the House of Cards scene.

"No, we did not have anything to do with that product placement," Criss says, or with the Golden Globe Awards gag last month where Julia Louis-Dreyfus ostentatiously puffed a blue-tipped e-cigarette. (Pro-"vaping" sites lit up with comments about the House of Cards moment since the show has become almost synonymous with product placement.)

As e-cigs continue to embed themselves in popular culture, lobbying efforts are heating up around the issue of how government will ultimately regulate the nascent battery-powered nicotine delivery system. All eyes are on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which, in concert with the White House Office of Management and Budget, is expected to soon release a long awaited proposal for regulating e-cigarettes.

Selling D.C. On A New Cig

Debate over the product's health effects continue. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek cover on e-cigs captured the discussion with this tagline: "They're new. They're blue. But will they still kill you?"

Because e-cigarettes don't burn tobacco, cancer-causing tar isn't delivered to users' lungs. But there are concerns that the electronic version could serve as a "gateway" to traditional cigarettes for young people, and that the full health effects of inhaling the nicotine vapor have yet been studied.

The question occupying both ECIG, which represents small producers of e-cigarettes, and tobacco giants like Reynolds American, which has a growing e-cigarette subsidiary, is whether the FDA will seek to regulate the nicotine delivery system in the same manner as traditional products that burn tobacco.

"We're focused not so much on the Hill, but more on the regulators," says Bryan Haynes, a partner and tobacco regulation expert at the large national law firm Troutman Sanders LLP and counsel for the ECIG.

"We do want the public to have a comfort level that what the manufacturers say is in the product is actually accurate," Haynes says. "At the same time, we do not believe that e-cigarettes should be regulated in the same way traditional tobacco products are regulated."

The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act includes restrictions on retail and online tobacco sales, limits on advertising and marketing to young people, and assesses user fees based on market share.

Criss, ECIG's spokesman, says that most e-cigarette producers, big and small, agree the product needs to be regulated to prevent its sale to minors, to control its ingredients, and to provide proper and accurate labeling.

He also acknowledges the concerns of anti-smoking advocates who have "worked very long and hard to make smoking not look cool – and this product looks like a cigarette, and has nicotine."

"That is a real concern when it comes to kids," he says, "but it is combusting tobacco that kills people."

The "white hat" message that ECIG is using to persuade regulators and Congress is this, according to Criss: e-cigarettes can "move existing smokers down the ladder of risk."

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids has another view. The group claimed this week that tobacco giant Lorillard Inc., in a Sports Illustrated advertisement for its e-cigarette, directly targeted teenage boys.

The ad by Lorillard, which last year spent about $2.8 million lobbying for issues including c-cigarettes, featured a close up of a model in a tiny bikini bottom emblazoned with the company's e-cigarette's logo.

In a blog post on its website, the group called on the FDA to prevent such marketing, asserting that the ad "is just the latest example of how marketing for e-cigarettes is using the same slick tactics long used to market regular cigarettes to kids."

The organization is on record, however, as saying that e-cigarettes could benefit public health if responsibly marketed.

Big Tobacco, New Market

David Howard is spokesman for Reynolds American, the parent company of subsidiaries that include the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of Camel, Pall Mall and Winston cigarettes, and the relatively new R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co., which produces the VUSE e-cigarette.

"We are in this business, and we are going to lobby on issues that affect our business, and we are going to have our side represented," Howard says. "These products are different from traditional tobacco products. There's no tobacco. There's no combustion."

The company, which in 2013 spent about $3.3 million lobbying for issues including e-cigarettes, activated it first statewide distribution of VUSE in Colorado last July. It went statewide in Utah in January, and the company is taking steps for a national rollout, he says.

"We believe there is significant potential in the category," Howard says. "Some analysts say it could be a $5 billion industry in the next handful of years."

When the FDA releases its proposed regulation, it simply begins a lengthy comment period, one that could very well spawn litigation. Howard mentions that R.J. Reynolds successfully challenged a marketing provision in the 2009 Tobacco Act after it was proposed.

So while e-cig lobbying has already been kicked up a notch, the real fight begins when the FDA makes its regulation proposal — any day now.