If you can structure your income so that you take it irregularly and do not have two consecutive months where your household income exceeds the monthly income limits, you can qualify for Apple Health even if your annual income does go over the annual limit. I learned this when I TRIED to sign up for a regular ACA plan when we had a large capital gain (house sale) and was informed by my Healthcare Navigator that a one-time bump in income that did not repeat would not kick my family off Apple Health.
Here is the pdf that explains how Apple Health works:
https://www.hca.wa.gov/assets/free-or-low-cost/22-315.pdf
OK this is fascinating and deserves much more conversation! Are you saying if you only withdraw money every 3 months you'd be eligible? Or just once for a whole year or what?
I also was put on Apple Health by surprise a few years ago. I had left my job in I think September and bought COBRA coverage for the rest of that year. During that time I had next to no income (except some quarterly dividends from my taxable account) as I wasn't selling investments and was instead just spending down my last few paychecks that I had retained in my checking account. I applied for subsidized ACA exchange coverage for the next year based on an annual income estimate around 2x the poverty level. However about half of that estimate was due to be paid in a lump sum from a deferred compensation plan payout from my prior job. The exchange looked at my income records and told me my family would actually be offered Medicaid since the recent few months had all had income below the qualifying threshold. I called into their customer service just to double-check that this wasn't an error. They assured me it was correct, and they also mentioned that the one-time deferred comp payment wasn't disqualifying because a) it's only a one-time thing, and b) it hadn't actually happened yet, and they only look backward at actual income to make these determinations.
Sure enough, Washington requires Apple Health recipients to report changes in income from month to month
when the income or deductions changed by at least $150 and that new amount is expected to persist for at least two months. As long as you never have consecutive months with income above the limit, especially in the months around your annual income review, there's no actual limit on how much income you can have in a year and still remain eligible for Apple Health.
Now, I do personally have some misgivings about intentionally scheduling my income to all be in one month just to be eligible for this health coverage, when the same income spread evenly throughout the year would cause me to be ineligible. That seems too much like "gaming the system" for my taste. It's important to keep the reasoning behind this rule in mind: the government doesn't want someone who experiences a sharp drop in income to be uninsured through the end of the year, nor do they generally find it worthwhile to kick people off the program when they have a temporary windfall just for one month only to process them back into it the next month. If your income naturally tends to be lumpy, so be it.
