the fee you pay if you don’t have health insurance

explosion :19-:22 sound of :19-:22 sound of explosion *best natural sound* tonight on your only live local news at 10 on the cw… a massive ball of fire rises from a train derailment…leading to evacutations… we’ll have the latest.. plus….confusion abounds with filing taxes and the new healthcare law… we’ll straighten things out for you tonight… *they’re stopping with all those detour signs way before the intersection do there. and what’s up with the closure on highway 9 in santa cruz county? your only live local news at 10 on the central coast cw…starts now. big changes this year in the way you file your taxes and the penalties – are even bigger! thank you for joing us. i’m jon brent. it all stems from the new healthcare law…that has many people confused. tonight news channel 5’s monica jacquez spoke to a local tax expert on what you need to know, to save you money. she joins us live in the newsroom with the story. monica? the last day to enroll for health insurance through covered california was sunday. which means if you don’t have health insurance you could be faced with penalty fees when filing your taxes. tax experts right now say it’s the number one question they get. what’s the penalty for not having health insurance? and what are the exceptions? *trt: 1:29 outcue::* the coverage price 10-15the affordable care act mandates that every american have health insurance – or pay up! carlos c. lopez, ea, lopez tax service 14:00 “the penalties can be as little as $95 or as much as 1 percent of your adjusted gross income up to $285.” and that fee is just for 2014 local tax expert carlos lopez says that number increases every year.***show gfx***so if you don’t have coverage this year in 2015 you’ll pay $325 per person for the yearor pay 2 percent of your yearly household income so if you are making $50 thousand a year that’s a $2 thousand tax penalty. but there are some exceptions 18 to be exact. 12:06 “let’s say for example you’re a student and you lived at your parents’ home and let’s say you finished school may 20th. so you have three months from that date to enroll into a health care plan.”also, if you’re covered by medi-cal or med-care or are undocumented you are exempt from the fee but lopez says in these instances watch out for fraud. earlier this month he had an undocumented client inform him that a tax office in salinas said he owned 15-hundred dollars in penality fees. 13:17 “so they go what do we do? and she said well for $500 i’ll make the penalty go away. and they never had a penalty.”but lopez says the easiet way to dodge the