Ow! Ow! Stop twisting my balls!

I know there are little kids in Haiti who are hungry and their homes are reduced to road gravel. But I’m still going to bitch about income taxes. In particular, income taxes and health insurance. I admit that I have been lazy. I should have declared myself to be self-employed when I bought my individual Blue Cross policy two years ago. It just didn’t dawn on me that I might want to write off the premiums. Last time I owned a business, I hired a book keeper and a tax accountant. I would send all my expense receipts and income statements to the book keeper, and he would give me a balance sheet at the end of the year. Then, I would send my balance sheet to the tax man and he would enter all the info into his computer and hit me for three hundred smackers. It was all fair enough. But that was ten years ago. I’ve lost the edge.

So, I’m doing my taxes on Tax Slayer the other night, when I see line 29 on form 1040 “self-employed health insurance”. The instructions said, “Enter the total amount you paid for health insurance coverage.” I did that and watched my refund climb by over five hundred bucks. Of course, I don’t have a business or a business checkbook or anything, and I didn’t want any trouble with the government types, so I deleted the amount I had just entered and decided to look into doing it legally.

Then, I had another idea. Maybe you can write off health care expenses. Yep. You can! Just fill out Schedule A and enter the total amount you spent on health care. THEN, here comes the balltwister. You multiply your Adjusted Gross Income by 7.5%. You cannot deduct any medical expenses under that figure. So if you make $40K you can write off ONLY those medical expenses that exceed, $3,000. Ow! What’s that? Oh, it’s just my balls. You’re twisting ‘em.

So, anyway, now I just got off the phone with Blue Cross, and they will have a marketing person call tomorrow, and we’ll set me up with a cute little NAICS number and a business name and I’ll be in business. It’s nice of them. Really. I know they’ll try to sell me a more expensive policy, but I may just buy a cheaper one. I don’t know.

I really have Congress to thank for waking me up to the problem. They’ve been talking about health care all year. Hell, now it’s a single word in English. Healthcare. But if those shitforbrainses hadn’t pricked around so long, they might have passed a bill by now. Then I might have forgotten about the whole thing and missed the opportunity to set up my own business. Of course, there is always the chance that they could have just struck the ball-twisting 7.5% rule on the Schedule A medical expense deduction and I would never have known the difference. But that would be too much to ask. Makes too much sense.