Most Recent Posts

This tax season, for the first time since the Affordable Care Act passed five years ago, consumers are facing its financial consequences.

Shots - Health News

State Lawmakers Keep Busy While Supreme Court Weighs Obamacare

Shots - Health News

Justices Roberts And Kennedy Hold Key Votes In Health Law Case

Whether they owe a penalty for not having health insurance , or have to figure out whether they need to pay back part of the subsidy they received to offset the cost of monthly insurance premiums, many people have to contend with new tax forms and calculations.

Christa Avampato, for example, bought a silver plan on the New York health insurance exchange last year. Initially, the 39-year-old was surprised and pleased to learn that she qualified for a $177 premium tax credit that is available to people with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level. The tax credit, which was sent directly to her health insurer every month, reduced the monthly premium she paid for her $400 plan to $223.

But a big check from a client at the end of last year pushed the self-employed consultant and content creator's income higher than she had estimated. When she filed her 2014 income taxes earlier this month she got the bad news: She must repay $750 of the tax credit she'd received.

Shots - Health News

Obamacare 'Glitch' Puts Subsidies Out Of Reach For Many Families

Avampato, who has moved to Florida, paid the bill out of her savings. Since her higher income meant she also owed more money on her federal and state income taxes, repaying the tax credit for her health plan was "just rubbing salt in the wound," Avampato says.

But she's not complaining. The tax credit made her health insurance much more affordable. Going forward, she says, she'll just keep in mind that repayment is a possibility.

It's hard for many people to perfectly estimate their annual income in advance, and changes in family status — such as marriage or divorce —can also throw off that estimate. The size of the premium tax credit is based on a family's income.

Like Avampato, 52 percent of people who enrolled in health insurance plans on the exchanges had to repay part of the subsidy they'd received to offset premiums. That's according to an analysis by H&R Block of the first six weeks of returns filed through the tax preparer. The average repayment was $530, while about a third of marketplace enrollees got a tax credit refund of $365, on average, according to H&R Block.

The amount that people have to repay has a cap that's based on their income. People whose income tops 400 percent of poverty ($45,960 for an individual) have to repay the entire premium tax credit.

The message for taxpayers is clear: If your income or family status changes, go back to the insurance marketplace now — and as necessary throughout the year — to make adjustments so you can minimize repayment issues when 2015 taxes are due.

Shots - Health News

How The Affordable Care Act Pays For Insurance Subsidies

Some people owe a penalty for not having health insurance. For 2014, the penalty is the greater of $95 or 1 percent of income. The H&R Block analysis found that the average penalty people paid for not having insurance was $172.

Consumers who learn they owe a penalty when they file their 2014 taxes can qualify for a special enrollment period to buy 2015 coverage, if they haven't already done so. That would protect them against a penalty on their next return.

Also, tax filers may be able to avoid the penalty by qualifying for an exemption.

Tax preparers often use software to help them complete people's returns, and the software includes the forms to apply for exemptions. For the most part, the software is up to the task, says Tara Straw, a health policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who manages a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site in the District of Columbia. But it comes up short with some of the more complicated calculations, she says.

A case in point: applying for the exemption from the health insurance requirement because coverage is unaffordable. Under the health law, if the minimum amount people would have to pay for employer coverage or a bronze level health plan is more than 8 percent of their household's income they don't have to buy insurance. That situation is likely to be one of the most common reasons for claiming an exemption.

But to figure out whether someone qualifies, the software would have to incorporate details such as the cost of the second lowest-cost silver plan available in that region, as well as the lowest cost bronze plan. The software can't do that, so tax preparers must complete the information by hand.

"That one, in particular," Straw says, "has been vexing."

Health Care

Affordable Care Act

taxes

Health Insurance

Here's what we know this morning about the German jetliner that crashed Tuesday into a mountainside in the French Alps, killing 150 people on board.

— French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says the cockpit voice recorder from Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 is damaged, but could still tell us why the plane went down. Segolene Royale, France's energy minister, said the key to the investigation was what happened in the two-minute span that began at 10:30 a.m. local time Tuesday. That's when the plane began to descend after reaching cruising altitude. And Transportation Minister Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio that investigators will focus "on the human voices, the conversations" on the voice recorder, followed by the cockpit sounds.

— Cazeneuve reiterated today that it was unlikely the plane was blown up.

"Every theory must be considered while the inquiry goes on," he said. "An explosion is not the No. 1 suspected cause because the debris from the plane is concentrated in an area of about 1 hectares. It's certainly a wide area because of the violence of the impact, but it shows that the plane probably didn't blow up."

— Ground crews are slowly making their way through new snow and rain to the scene to recover the bodies of the victims of the flight that was traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany.

— Francis Hermitte, the mayor of Seyne-Les-Alpes, a town close to the site of the crash, says families are expected to arrive at the town today. The leaders of France, Germany and Spain will meet them there, he said.

— We learned on Tuesday that the victims of the crash included two babies, 16 German high-schoolers and their two teachers. Two opera singers were among the victims, multiple news reports say. Britain's Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said at least three Britons were among the victims. He said that number could rise. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said an Israeli citizen who lived in Spain was among the victims.

— Employees of Germanwings and Lufthansa, the low-cost carrier's parent company, around the world will hold a minute of silence at 10.53 a.m. today, Lufthansa said. That's when the contact with the flight was lost.

germanwings Flight 4U 9525

air crash

Germany

Spain

France

Imagine, for a moment, that every Web search gave only accurate, verified information. Imagine that questions concerning real facts about the real world returned lists of websites ordered by how well those site's facts matched the real world.

Search for "Barack Obama's nationality," and websites claiming "Kenya" would be banished to the 32nd page of the list. Search for "measles and autism" and you'd have to scroll down for 10 minutes before you found a page claiming they were linked.

Imagine a world in which information on the Web had to be accurate. Well, you don't have to imagine very hard, because that world now seems entirely possible.

In today's world, Web searches rank sites based on their popularity — in terms of links made from other sites to the site in question — as well as the "quality" of those links. Recently, however, researchers at Google published a remarkable paper demonstrating how rankings in a Web search can be driven by something entirely different: the veracity of the facts the sites contain.

The new paper instantly caused a stir. Advocates and detractors argued over what constitutes a "fact" as they pondered the far-reaching consequences of a truth-based Internet.

Before we consider those consequences, however, it's important to see the research itself as a fascinating measure of how powerful the growing field of "data science" has become. As the authors state in their introduction:

"In this paper, we address the fundamental question of estimating how trustworthy a given web source is. Informally, we define the trustworthiness or accuracy of a web source as the probability that it contains the correct value for a fact (such as Barack Obama's nationality), assuming that it mentions any value for that fact ..."

To achieve their goal, the researchers devised a "knowledge-based trust" evaluation algorithm to define any site's accuracy. They write:

"We extract a plurality of facts from many pages using information extraction techniques. We then jointly estimate the correctness of these facts and the accuracy of the sources using inference in a probabilistic model. Inference is an iterative process, since we believe a source is accurate if its facts are correct, and we believe the facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source. We leverage the redundancy of information on the web to break the symmetry. Furthermore, we show how to initialize our estimate of the accuracy of sources based on authoritative information, in order to ensure that this iterative process converges to a good solution."

Thus, the whole process is repetitive, drilling down to an ever-better link between claims and verifiable knowledge about the world. It works via the researchers' use of Google's giant Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Vault projects, which have been using the Web to build links between facts and reference works for an insane amount of information. "Facts" are actually represented in the study as "knowledge triples" such as (Albany, New York, capital) or (Barack Obama, nationality, American). By comparing a specific knowledge triple found in any given Web page against the giant databases, the algorithm can determine any website's accuracy in relation to established facts.

It's a powerful and clever approach, but more to the point, it appears to work. Applied to 2.8 billion facts, the researchers were able to evaluate the trustworthiness of more than 119 million websites. Thus it appears that, yes, accuracy can be used as a criterion for ranking Web-searches.

But to understand what this means as compared to the old link-based rankings, consider this from The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey:

"In one trial with a random sampling of pages, researchers found that only 20 of 85 factually correct sites were ranked highly under Google's current scheme. A switch could, theoretically, put better and more reliable information in the path of the millions of people who use Google every day. And in that regard, it could have implications not only for [search engine design] — but for civil society and media literacy."

Google has been explicit that this is only research and there are no plans to implement the system anytime soon. Still, the reaction to the paper makes it clear that, for some, even the ideas in the paper present significant problems.

As Anthony Watts, who runs a popular climate skeptic website, told Fox News, "I worry about this issue greatly. ... My site gets a significant portion of its daily traffic from Google." He added, "It is a very slippery and dangerous slope because there's no arguing with a machine."

If such accuracy-based Web searches were ever to become the norm, it seems clear that the Internet — as a public space for information distribution — would be fundamentally changed. And with that possibility, we can see how even the discussion around Google's research raises two fundamental questions for society: Do we believe there are actual facts about the world? Do we believe there are ways to judge them to be so?

There is a lot riding on our answers.

Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science." You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4.

civil society

accuracy

web search

facts

Google

California's system of direct democracy — the voter initiative process — has produced landmark laws reducing property taxes, banning affirmative action and legalizing medical marijuana.

Now there's a bid to declare that "the people of California wisely command" that gays and lesbians can be killed.

You read that right.

The "Sodomite Suppression Act," as proposed, calls sodomy "a monstrous evil" that should be punishable "by bullets to the head or any other convenient method."

The act would punish anyone who distributes "sodomistic propaganda" to minors with a $1 million fine, and/or up to 10 years in prison, and/or the possibility of a lifetime expulsion from California.

The proposal comes from a Huntington Beach-based attorney, Matt McLaughlin. He did not return calls for comment, and his voice mailbox is full.

Now maybe you're thinking there's no way such a blatantly illegal measure would ever be approved by California voters.

But here's the rub: We might get a chance to find out, because it appears that there's no legal way for state officials to stop the author of this proposal from collecting enough voter signatures to put it on the ballot.

Legal experts are left shaking their heads.

Vikram Amar, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Davis, said he is almost reluctant to even get drawn into the discussion "to give this guy the attention he wants."

Still, Amar noted there are at least two big issues at stake.

One, given that it costs only $200 to submit an initiative and start the signature-gathering process in California, perhaps the fee should be higher to discourage people from abusing the process. (On the other hand, that could make it prohibitive for legitimate grass-roots petitions to gain traction without well-off backers.)

Two, some advocate that the state attorney general, the official whose job duties include writing a title and summary for any proposed initiative, should have the authority to kill a proposal that would conflict with superseding law — like murder. (Of course, then elected partisan officials with their own political agendas would be the filters.)

But both of those ideas raise their own problems, Amar said.

"Anyone who has 200 bucks for an initiative, probably can raise 2,000 bucks," he said. "But raise it to something meaningful like [10,000] or 20,000 bucks, then you're sending a message about the accessibility of direct democracy."

i

California Attorney General Kamala Harris Richard Vogel/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Richard Vogel/AP

California Attorney General Kamala Harris

Richard Vogel/AP

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, favors raising the fee, even though she said, "It won't stop people from submitting crazy ideas."

Like Amar, Alexander does not favor the idea of allowing an elected official, in this case Attorney General Kamala Harris, to block the measure outright by calling it illegal.

The initiative process "needs to be kept at arm's length from the Legislature and the politicians who frequently want to usurp its power," Alexander said.

The initiative's author has provoked discussion and controversy. In fact, there have been calls for McLaughlin to be disbarred for advocating murder.

But, in the end, Amar doubts his idea will ever get enough voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. It's estimated that a ballot-initiative campaign in California costs about $1 million to collect the 365,888 signatures to qualify.

It will take several million dollars more to get enough signatures for such a controversial idea, Amar contends.

"But if I get approached by someone asking me to sign this thing," Amar said, "that will spoil my day having to think about this guy."

California ballot

gay rights