Open enrollment is under way for 2026 insurance coverage, and millions of Americans are facing extreme sticker shock thanks to the end of expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, which capped Obamacare premiums for a \u201cbenchmark\u201d insurance plan at 8.5 percent of income. Twenty-two million people relied on that funding, at a cost of about $35 billion annually.<\/p>\n
With the expanded subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, reverting back to a less generous subsidy level last in place in 2021, patients around the country are facing premium increases that are so extreme, they\u2019re either reducing health insurance coverage or dropping it altogether. Some are facing price hikes many multiples higher than they paid last year; those whose costs only doubled told the Prospect they considered themselves lucky by comparison.<\/p>\n
More from Whitney Curry Wimbish<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n A retiree in Colorado, Jeff Rowan, described how this year\u2019s open enrollment is driven by a sense of fear. His 2026 premium for a health plan on the state insurance exchange went from $350 a month to around $900. So he switched to a plan offered by his pension, which is $700, still a 100 percent increase. Last year, Rowan concluded that was \u201can outrageous amount.\u201d Not anymore.<\/p>\n At one point, Rowan seriously contemplated dropping health insurance completely, he said. \u201cBut the fear of something unexpected happening and my moderate savings being wiped out is forcing me to pay the piper. It\u2019s a completely fear-based decision.\u201d<\/p>\n A small-business owner in Wisconsin, Galen Perkins, said he once made the opposite decision and lived to regret it. Years ago, he thought he could save money by skipping insurance; then he landed in the emergency room. Now, though his ACA premium is increasing by one-quarter, he\u2019s just going to pay it and find ways to save elsewhere in his budget. He expects many people will pull back spending to the bare minimum, forgoing vacation and entertainment, and expects they will decide, \u201c\u2018We\u2019re just going to buy food, pay rent, pay health insurance, and that\u2019s it.\u2019 I can\u2019t see how it doesn\u2019t ding the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n Some patients are looking for help from their elected officials, such as Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI), who said his constituents are describing \u201cstaggering\u201d premium increases. One constituent, a retired marketing executive named Susan, told him that she\u2019s currently paying about $600 a month with ACA tax credits. Next year, that will jump to $2,120, a 250 percent increase. Another constituent, Sarah, who owns a small business with her husband, said her premiums will jump from $536 a month to more than $1,000, an 89 percent increase.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are just a few of the stories I have heard,\u201d Magaziner said via email. \u201cAmericans cannot afford these price increases. These spikes will break household budgets in Rhode Island and across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n Staff for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), meanwhile, told me they\u2019ve fielded 3,200 messages from constituents about health care costs in this month alone.<\/p>\n \u201cWorking families are already struggling to get by as the costs of childcare, rent, and groceries continue to skyrocket,\u201d Bennet said via email. \u201cThe least we could do is make things a little easier and extend the ACA premium tax credits that make their health insurance more affordable. We must fight to extend this lifeline and bring down health care costs, or countless families will be forced to go without coverage next year.\u201d<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not an option, President Trump yelled on social media<\/a> Tuesday night. \u201cTHE ONLY HEALTHCARE I WILL SUPPORT OR APPROVE IS SENDING THE MONEY DIRECTLY BACK TO THE PEOPLE, WITH NOTHING GOING TO THE BIG, FAT, RICH INSURANCE COMPANIES, WHO HAVE MADE $TRILLIONS, AND RIPPED OFF AMERICA LONG ENOUGH,\u201d he said on the website he owns.<\/p>\n \u201cTHE PEOPLE WILL BE ALLOWED TO NEGOTIATE AND BUY THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, INSURANCE. POWER TO THE PEOPLE! Congress, do not waste your time and energy on anything else. This is the only way to have great Healthcare in America!!! GET IT DONE, NOW.\u201d<\/p>\n Republican lawmakers are reportedly coming up with a fix, such as giving people money directly via flexible savings accounts or health savings accounts, which they would then use to \u201cnegotiate prices\u201d with health care companies. Fellow Prospect-er Ryan Cooper notes that this won\u2019t work<\/a>. Even Trump himself acknowledged<\/a> that most people would send that money right back to insurance companies, the only entities in the economy with the leverage to negotiate with hospitals under the current system.<\/p>\n THE END OF ACA SUBSIDIES WITH NO PLAN IN PLACE<\/strong> means that people who believe they\u2019re healthy will simply not get coverage, said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on the health care system. The remaining population on insurance will be sicker on average, a condition that doctors and economists sometimes refer to as a worse \u201crisk pool.\u201d That makes it costlier for companies to insure the average policyholder. So the result of millions dropping unaffordable health insurance, as the Congressional Budget Office has forecast<\/a>, will be that insurance subsequently gets more expensive.<\/p>\n What happens on ACA exchanges doesn\u2019t just stay there. Because major insurance companies are the ones providing the ACA coverage, this means one way they\u2019ll make up the loss caused by the worse risk pool is by raising premiums on their clients who get their insurance through their employer.<\/p>\n Taylor M., who works for a health care provider in central New York, said his employer-provided insurance is increasing by 30 percent to about $130 per pay period, an amount he said he could deal with. But the cost for those co-workers paying for their entire family is increasing from about $600 to $700 per pay period, a smaller percentage increase but a total dollar amount that\u2019s prohibitively high.<\/p>\n \u201cI would say that on some level, people may not have realized that this is what they were voting for,\u201d he said of Trump\u2019s re-election. \u201cBut it was what they were voting for.\u201d<\/p>\n Sam, a worker in Portland, Oregon, had been stressed to find that an ACA bronze plan, the lowest-cost policy on the exchanges, would cost him about $420 a month. It would cover neither of his two generic medications nor primary care visits and also expose him to \u201cmassive deductibles.\u201d He was instead able to get on his wife\u2019s private insurance, but that adds an extreme new cost to the household, too, of about $500. That\u2019s on top of the $2,600 the family now must come up with every month because they hit the benefit cliff for food stamps and free child care.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of a sudden, we\u2019re really stretched thin,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s just so brutal.\u201d<\/p>\n Like others navigating the horror show, Sam said the cost-of-living crisis is frightening. He wonders, if Republicans are going to make health care unaffordable, will they also roll back other Democratic policies, like allowing insurance companies to deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions? Indeed, one of the options<\/a> Republicans are pitching for patients without insurance is enrolling in \u201cshort-term\u201d or \u201cjunk\u201d insurance plans, which are not required to cover pre-existing conditions. Officials in five states have barred these products. But the Trump administration relaxed the rules<\/a> governing them in August.<\/p>\n Sam wonders if any policy changes will harm his two-year-old son, who was born on Medicaid, which in Oregon means he can stay on it until he\u2019s five. The situation is depressing, he said, and the logic of crushing working people is bizarre.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like this war,\u201d Sam said, \u201con everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRecommended Reading<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open enrollment is under way for 2026 insurance coverage, and millions of Americans are facing extreme sticker shock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[275],"tags":[24149,10471,6862,356,18,135,14064,475,493,474,19,17,8309],"class_list":{"0":"post-193390","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-affordable-care-act","9":"tag-budget","10":"tag-congress","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-health-social-policy","15":"tag-health-care","16":"tag-health-insurance","17":"tag-healthcare","18":"tag-ie","19":"tag-ireland","20":"tag-republicans"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115590275924663458","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}