I wondered which income groups would most likely choose to pay the annual tax penalty for not having health insurance? As it turns out, 79% of that group had household income of $50,000/yr or less. The ~6.7 million households probably means at least 14 million people choose to tell the government to stuff it with their mandatory health insurance requirement.
Info is from 2015.
I'm guessing that many of those choosing to pay the penalty tax and forgo health insurance are the young and healthy.There were 6,665,480 households who chose to pay the Obamacare penalty in that year rather than signing up for Affordable Care Act coverage. They paid a total of $3,079,255,000.
Of the 6.7 million households who chose to pay a penalty, 37 percent—2.5 million households—earned a salary less than $25,000 per year. There were 5.2 million households that earned a salary less than $50,000 per year who decided to pay the penalty, which totaled 79 percent of households paying the penalty. Finally, 92 percent of the households—6.1 million households—paid the penalty and earned less than $75,000 a year.
The penalties have increased every year since the Affordable Care Act was implemented. In 2014, the penalty totaled a flat fee of $95 or 1 percent of income above the filing threshold. In 2015, the penalty increased to a flat fee of $325 or 2 percent of a household's income, whichever one was higher. In 2016 and 2017, the penalties increased even higher to a flat fee of $695 or 2.5 percent of gross income.