And if premium deductions from Social Security were mistakenly stopped, they will resume in October, Dr. McClellan said.
American families spend almost twice as much on health care — through premiums, paycheck deductions and out-of-pocket expenses — as families in any other country.
Officials for Intuit, the Mountain View, Calif., company that produces the program, were alerted to the problem last week, after a retired federal worker from Virginia noticed that TurboTax had automatically double-counted his medical insurance premiums as deductions.
Still, since employees often pay 30 percent or more of the premium through payroll deductions, their portion of a refund can be significant, noted Shawn J. Nowicki, director of health policy for the Northeast Business Group on Health, a coalition seeking to reduce health care costs.
The family itself contributed another 25 percent, or $5,114, toward the premium via direct payroll deduction.
And he has added new ones from a tax credit for health-care premiums to a tax deduction for charitable contributions.
Back home the parent company gets a tax deduction for premiums that really are transfers of assets held in reserve for future payouts.
But the tax return calculated by TurboTax promised him a refund $600 larger than he was entitled to because it automatically added his medical insurance premiums to his deductions — after the computer-generated prompt had instructed him to enter his health care expenses manually.
However, where revenues from individual annual-premium-payments, monthly deductions from formal sector workers, and NHIA share from the value added taxation (VAT) are not enough to support the scheme, stakeholders should devise innovative ways of funding.
People with their own policies who have enough expenses to claim an income tax deduction could not deduct either the premiums for policies that cover abortion or the cost of an abortion.
Under a bill passed by the House in October, people who buy health insurance on their own could take a tax deduction for the premiums they pay.
