Filing 2012 income taxes? Five changes to watch for.

Here are new income tax provisions to watch for as you work through your 1040 form:

3. Health insurance refunds

Daniel Shanken/AP Images for UnitedHealthCare/File
John Tull (left), from Penn State Sports Properties, and Randy Weinstock (right), vice president of operations at UnitedHealthcare, present a donation to Susan Day outside Beaver Stadium at Penn State University in 2009 for starting the Angels for Alyssa foundation. UnitedHealthcare was one of the health-insurance companies that returned some $1.1 billion in premiums to policyholders in 2012 under the Affordable Care Act.

Because of health reform, insurance plans that didn't spend at least 80 percent of premiums on health services had to refund 12.8 million customers some $1.1 billion in premiums last year. If taxpayers took a deduction on those premiums last year, then they'll have to report the refunds this year. "It's the same principle as state tax refunds," Mr. Rodgers says.

Health insurance payments may also show up on a W-2. Those reports have no effect this year, but employers are preparing for 2014, when taxpayers (absent an exemption) will owe a penalty if they don't carry health insurance.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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