How much did your ACA premiums rise?
Knowing that Obamacare enhanced subsidies expired on Jan. 1, I held up a sign asking drivers how many times their 2026 ACA premiums rose: 2x? 3x? 8x?
One pedestrian told me three times. One driver held up six fingers. Another held up five. All young women. (Boomers like me are on Medicare.)
Those are people actually paying attention. Others who let their policies renew automatically are in for a shock (The New York Times):
About 1.4 million fewer people have enrolled in Obamacare coverage this year in the face of soaring premiums, according to an early report, following the expiration of the enhanced subsidies that helped lower the cost of health insurance for millions of Americans.
Numbers published by the federal government on Monday indicated that 22.8 million Americans had enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans starting Jan. 1, down from 24.2 million enrolled through the end of the sign-up period last year. They are the first official figures showing the effects of the change in policy.
The new data covered sign-ups through Jan. 3. People can still enroll through Thursday. Comparing the new data to a similar period last year, enrollment declined by 800,000 people, versus 1.4 million when compared to last year’s entire enrollment period.
Many health policy experts expect enrollment to fall further in the coming months as people whose policies were automatically renewed may decide to drop coverage once they receive their first bill reflecting a much higher price.
A senior vice persident at KFF (Kaiser) believes that it’s too early to tell what the final decline will be. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services attributes the decline to increased anti-fraud measures, not to higher costs. That’s the safe answer in this administration.
If the bipartisan bill to extend the subsidies approved by the House makes it past the Senate and onto the president’s desk, Donald Trump may veto it.
The expiration of the extra subsidies has doubled the amount people will have to pay for insurance, on average. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the result will result in two million more Americans becoming uninsured this year. But other analysts have estimated larger losses of coverage.
Adrianna McIntyre, an assistant professor of health policy at Harvard, said she thinks the final enrollment number could drop by several million in the next few months. “I don’t think this is the final number,” she said.
Nor do we know what the fallout will be when voters realize their insurance is now so unaffordable that they have to cancel it and hope for the best (health). The real fallout for Republicans may come in November.