Lieb said that when she helped McClanahan's clients sign up on and pick their plans, 'they were usually pretty pleased and excited' when they saw how much subsidies they would be getting to lower their premiums.

'I think they were more, 'If I can't beat them, join them.'' 'Then they said, 'Well, shoot, I'm going to try to qualify myself,'' Lieb said. 'I think a lot of it was very politically motivated, that they didn't necessarily agree with the Affordable Care Act itself,' she said. Lieb said that some clients initially 'were pretty disgusted about the subsidies and how it all works' when Obamacare first began taking effect.

The clients, all of whom had paid off their homes, needed 'anywhere between $5,000 and $7,000 a month' to live on, she said.Īngie Koury Lieb, a Jacksonville insurance broker, helped McClanahan's clients get into those plans, which in Florida are sold on the federally run Obamacare exchange. 'The first thing you've got to figure out is how much money do they need to live on,' she said. McClanahan said she helped the clients structure their income stream - and the taxable component of it - 'just right.'

If their incomes fell below that, they would not qualify for the subsidies to help buy private plans, and also would not qualify for government-run Medicaid because Florida rejected expanding that program to cover more low-income people. Those people, while having relatively high net worths due to investments and real estate, also were in a position to have taxable income that was low enough to qualify for Obamacare subsidies.īut that income could still be high enough to keep them above 100 percent of the poverty level. They no longer had the option of getting health insurance through their jobs, and were too young to qualify for Medicare, the federal health insurance program for senior citizens. McClanahan's Obamacare customer clients were all retirees who stopped working before they were 65 years old.

Zevera premium account 5-27-2016