To some extent this is already happening:
Tax preparers won’t act as insurance brokers themselves. Instead, they are partnering with commercial online health marketplaces to ease enrollment.
For example, Jackson Hewitt is working with the online marketplace Getinsured to enroll people. Jackson Hewitt will calculate subsidies and potential penalties and, if customers choose, transmit that information to Getinsured. If the Jackson Hewitt customer wants to buy coverage, all she’ll need to do is pick an insurance plan. Jackson Hewitt can even fill out all the paperwork for people to enroll in Medicaid. It says it will not charge for any of these insurance-related services.
Because Jackson Hewitt has 2800 locations in Walmart stores, it could be an especially important link to the uninsured.
H&R Block announced in September that it is partnering with the commercial online health exchange GoHealth to help people enroll through Block-branded online chat and phone support…
Intuit has created a product called TurboTax Health to assist buyers and has entered into its own partnership with the commercial online marketplace eHealth Inc.
Combined, these three firms alone claim to help file nearly 50 million returns—making them a huge potential portal for insurance buyers. The IRS estimates that about two-thirds of low-income taxpayers use paid preparers–many use walk-in firms such as Block and Jackson Hewitt. And Haile estimates that 90 percent of the uninsured get refunds. He predicts these individuals will be far more interested in buying insurance with those refunds in-hand than they are today, when they are focused on holiday shopping.
That’s the Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman writing. Howard goes on to say that “Using tax prep firms as a link into the health insurance market won’t solve all the problems of the Affordable Care Act,” which is true, but at least the still-mostly-privatized aspects of the health system created by the law might save it from its immediate problem, which is a lack of enrollees.
Related: amazingly, 48% of early visitors to ObamaCare.gov did not enroll because they weren’t sure they could afford it. Unlike the 37% of visitors who didn’t get a plan because of “technical difficulties,” these visitors can’t be convinced to enroll by the fact that the website is merely functioning. They need to feel like the plan is affordable, and they are nearly half of the people who first visited the site. Tax preparers should be able to address their concerns, especially around April/May, when low-income and uninsured taxpayers are flush with refunds.
