We'd like to extend our invitation to you to game the system

Incentives always matter and in Obamacare, they lead to suggestions of this sort:

People whose 2014 income will be a little too high to get subsidized health insurance from Covered California next year should start thinking now about ways to lower it to increase their odds of getting the valuable tax subsidy.

"If they can adjust (their income), they should," says Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation. "It's not cheating, it's allowed."

Under the Affordable Care Act, if your 2014 income is between 138 and 400 percent of poverty level for your household size, you can purchase health insurance on a state-run exchange (such as Covered California) and receive a federal tax subsidy to offset all or part of your premium.

If your income falls below 138 percent of poverty, you qualify for Medicaid, which provides no-cost health care to low-income people. In California, it's called Medi-Cal.

If your income is higher than 400 percent of poverty, you can purchase a policy on or off the exchange, but in either case, you won't get a subsidy and the policy must provide certain essential benefits that many low-cost individual policies lack today, such as maternity care.

So if you are a family of four, for example, you'd better not earn more than $94,200. If you earn $94,201, you could end up paying full freight on insurance, which would mean the extra dollar you earned could cost you about 10 grand in additional premiums. And if you don't need maternity care, well, tough luck, you gotta buy it, because it's "essential."

The larger issue is that working harder and earning that extra dollar is now a bad decision. Why try to get ahead? Let's all game the system and hope someone else will subsidize us. I don't see how that sort of regime is going to be sustainable in the long term.