[PaulDavisThe1st]

[ EDIT: Since the undated article is actually from Feb 2020, predating the expansion of federal health insurance subsidies, I withdraw everything I said below. ]

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The opening story is fabricated and/or bullshit.

Last year (2025) there was no limit on income for health insurance subsidies. That ended for this year, but last year there would have been no reason for anyone who knew what they were doing to try to lose money to drop their income (especially in the cited range of $48-55k/year).

That is the case this year, in most states (thankfully not where I live), but that's not what TFA is talking about.

Suspicious? It certainly makes me skeptical that the author has got the details of the other examples correct.

[XRG]

Goes to show that having a creation date placed somewhere near the top of an article or blog post is a good idea.

[TeMPOraL]

It's always a good idea, and it's rather an obvious point - not to mention, something schools try to drill into kids since they're single-digit years old.

At this point I treat lack of dating articles as being done intentionally, and as evidence of malicious intent - i.e. that the entity publishing it has a reason they don't want readers to know the creation date, and there's really no reason other than trying to get away with lies or otherwise screw the reader over.

(Above is a heuristic I apply by default; this post is an example of a case-by-case exception, because of the type of site, my impression of articles read in the past, and of the author themselves.)

[forbiddenlake]

The post is from February 2020.

I can't see a date on the post (on mobile) but the archives link has month and year.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Well then, I take it all back.

[norseboar]

This might vary state-by-state, CA MediCal for instance did limit the subsidies based on income last year. I don't think it was an all-or-nothing cutoff, but I do think there were points around the 50k mark where the delta between your subsidy and the one for the lower bracket was higher than the loss you'd take by a few thousand dollars.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The subsidies were from the federal government, managed as part of your federal income tax return. They had nothing to do with additional state subsidies.

The basic story was that until the end of 2025, nobody in the USA had any reason to pay more than (roughly) 8.3% of their AGI for health insurance.