My wife, the syndicated San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders, has been hearing from “mature vulnerables” — e.g., middle-aged productive people–complaining bitterly about the huge hikes they are experiencing in health insurance premiums under Obamacare.

Now, Kathleen Pender, the splendid business section columnist for the Chronicle explains the obvious solution – lower your income! From “Lower Pay Can Earn Huge Tax Subsidy on Health Care”:

People whose 2014 income will be a little too high to get subsidized health insurance from Covered California next year should start thinking now about ways to lower it to increase their odds of getting the valuable tax subsidy. “If they can adjust (their income), they should,” says Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It’s not cheating, it’s allowed.”…
If your income falls below 138 percent of poverty, you qualify for Medicaid, which provides no-cost health care to low-income people. In California, it’s called Medi-Cal. If your income is higher than 400 percent of poverty, you can purchase a policy on or off the exchange, but in either case, you won’t get a subsidy and the policy must provide certain essential benefits that many low-cost individual policies lack today, such as maternity care. For older people, getting below the 400 percent poverty limit could save many thousands of dollars per year.

Don’t blame the messenger: She’s right.

Who would have ever thought that it would become a respectable thing to intentionally do less well in order to make others — e.g. taxpayers — carry your weight.

This is very insidious and destructive to a free people. Greece, here we come!