No.
And you also can get busted if your pills don’t match your prescription. (your bottle says 10mg xanax and you filled it with 20mg bars from Mexico). But honestly, if they bust you, you might as well just give it up and say you didn’t know what they were and the pharmacy gave them to you for pain.
People rarely get busted at customs. Of all the gays I know that routinely go to Mexico and bring back all kinds of shit, I’ve heard like maybe 1 case of someone getting their shit confiscated.
My ex was searched before, and they pulled his drug bottles out, but never looked in the bottles so see what’s in them.
If you are carrying half a dozen unlabeled pills, customs doesn’t care, and is really unlikely to look or ask. But if you are trying to stock up, you may well be carrying enough that they get curious.
This is a hot topic in FIRE (financial independence; retire early) circles. Many people who plan to exit the workforce before medicare eligibility have some kind of plan to manipulate their taxable income and qualify for ACA subsidies.
This is a tough one for me because I think healthcare should be universally guaranteed, and it is really silly that we don’t do that in the United States. But on the other hand, if you’re a millionaire or multi millionaire who is leaving the workforce early in the US, you’re probably doing it on the strength of a few things, including a low effective tax rate (relative to places that do guarantee healthcare access).
As much as I believe in universal healthcare, I just don’t now if I can get on board with high income people accumulating a ton of money on the strenght of low effective taxes, working a relatively short period of time, and then turning around and taking subsidies.
IMO someone in this position should work/save enough to pay the ACA premiums OOP. You still get guaranteed issue, which is a huge improvement from 10 years ago.
Not a relative, but researching stuff for a friend of a friend who could not comprehend why they were getting a ~ $16,000 Premium Tax Credit when they made in excess of $1,000,000 in 2021. They assumed their tax software made a mistake and were seeking advice on how to fix it before the extended filing deadline on Monday.
Nope! Tax software was correct. If you (or your spouse, if married) got one week (or more) of Unemployment benefits in 2021 then for the purpose of calculating your Premium Tax Credit, your income is assumed to be 133% of Federal Poverty Level irrespective of your actual income. Free health insurance!!!
They were quite pleased, of course, but it took some doing to convince them that it really wasn’t a mistake.
Oof. Bad oversight on the part of congress. COVID was an emergency though so I guess I forgive them. Same with PPP.
It sucks that money went to bad places, but on balance, we kept people in their homes, developed a vaccine within a year, and 2 years later, unemployment is historically low.
The thing is… it’s hard to fathom why anyone thought this was a good idea.
You could just reset the %FPL cutoffs to higher numbers for one year only without removing the income cap on PTC altogether.
Obviously not something to write your congressperson about since it’s already expired, but it’s quite the bizarre impact.
I wonder how many VITA returns I did that had this issue and I didn’t notice. The software calculates the %FPL and if the correct percent was 245% and the software slapped 133% on the form I probably wouldn’t have caught that.
But when the correct percent is 5,800% and the software calculates 133% it’s a little more obvious!
Your situation sounds somewhat similar to my sister. She’s on extremely expensive and necessary meds for her MS, and is basically locked in to staying with her current employer as it’s all covered at the moment by their insurer after jumping through hoops for a while.
How would you do that? The ACA defined a set of services that have to be covered, maybe something similar? I’d be up for that and, if we’re gonna keep step therapy around, maybe codify something around how egregious payers can be. And, as discussed, if you’ve gone through it once, you shouldn’t have to do it again, so there should be something baked into the data exchange or something???
For one thing definitely require that insurers accept each other’s step therapy results so that patients don’t have to repeat it every time they change insurers. Standardize that process and require transferability.
Maybe regulate hold times? That would be tricky as you wouldn’t want to incentivize them to drop calls. But you could regulate the ratio of call center employees to members maybe??? For at least 1,500 hours a year there must be at least one call center employee working for every X members. I’m not sure what X should be.