If you are a member of a health care sharing ministry you probably already know that you are exempt from the ACA fines for not having health insurance, but maybe you’re a tad unsure how to do the tax paperwork. Samaritan has made a great little instructional video to guide you both with the paper method and software preparations. It’s very very easy, and seeing it stepped out for you should help a lot.  Here’s a link to the video on Samaritan’s blog.

http://samaritanministries.org/tax/

On a side note: our family has filed our taxes already, and our tax preparer said ours was one of the easiest he’s done all season when it comes to the health insurance portion. We just filled out the one page listing our exemption. Easy. But so many of his clients had multiple pages of forms to manage because of varying combinations of coverage. For example, several families have had the kids on Medicaid, one parent had employer coverage, and the other had nothing (because they couldn’t afford to add anyone to the employer plan)… he said that situation produces multiple pages of forms and he didn’t appreciate being a policeman regarding health insurance. It was interesting to hear his side of it. That didn’t even cover the frustration of his clients who had to pay back subsidies or were getting blindsided by penalties. He was not enjoying this tax season at all. When he saw how easy our health care exemption form he seemed quite pleased.

I would consider the ease of the tax prep regarding health care “coverage” to be a definite perk of being a Samaritan Ministries member. Of course I’d rather not have to report it at all, but since it is the law at least the method for ministry members is simple.