Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News senior correspondent Julie Appleby discussed the affordability of Affordable Care Act health insurance plans on Connecticut Public’s The Wheelhouse on July 22.

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Céline Gounder, Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed tick bites on CBS’ CBS Mornings on July 20. She also discussed wildfire smoke and severe heat on CBS’ The Daily Report on July 16.

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Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News senior correspondent Renuka Rayasam discussed the effects of soaring health costs in Georgia on WUGA’s The Georgia Health Report on July 17.

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• Read Rayasam’s “Patients Face a Thicket of Red Tape Trying To Maintain Consistent Health Coverage.”

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Céline Gounder, Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the Department of Health and Human Services’ plan to offer compensation for automatic covid vaccine injuries and the drop in enrollment in Affordable Care Act health plans on CBS’ The Takeout With Major Garrett on July 10 and 9, respectively.

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Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News Southern correspondent Sam Whitehead discussed abortion telehealth on WUGA’s The Georgia Health Report on July 10.

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• Read Kate Wells’ “A Ban Won’t Stop Abortion Pill Access, Telehealth Providers Say.”

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In preliminary filings with state regulators, insurers are seeking a median rate increase of 14% for 2027, according to in 16 states and the District of Columbia by the Peterson-Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health System Tracker.

If those rates are ultimately approved, it would be the second-highest increase since 2018.

That would be a “triple whammy” for consumers, said Cynthia Cox, a senior vice president and the director of the Program on the ACA at KFF, because they have already had to pay higher premiums in 2026 and saw the expiration of more generous tax credits to offset their premiums at the end of last year.

President Joe Biden sought to bolster the program known as Obamacare by enacting more generous tax subsidies, driving down out-of-pocket costs for consumers and increasing enrollment to more than 20 million Americans. But under President Donald Trump, Republicans have sought to scale back taxpayer support for ACA coverage, allowing the Biden-era enhanced subsidies to expire.

As of February, ACA enrollment had fallen by about 3 million people compared with the same time last year. While Cox and other policy experts say that’s because increased costs for the plans drove out people who feel they can get by without insurance, the Trump administration asserts that much of the enrollment growth under Biden .

The main factor driving proposed premium increases for 2027, as in most years, is the rising cost and use of medical care.

There’s growing demand for costly specialty medications and for the weight loss drugs known as GLP-1s, the Peterson-KFF report notes.

But the report also said that about 4 percentage points’ worth of the premium increases insurers proposed are due to lasting effects of the expiration of enhanced subsidies. Insurers expect that with young and healthy people leaving the program rather than paying higher premiums, their remaining customers will be older, sicker, and therefore costlier on average.

 “It’s likely that the people who dropped their coverage were also the healthier people, because sicker people were probably going to try to make it work however they could, to stretch their budget to keep their health insurance,” said Cox, of KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

In their rate filings, some insurers also said they had to raise premiums partly because of policy changes by the Trump administration that are expected to make it harder for some people to enroll.

Together with the expiration of the larger subsidies, the new rules “account for 12.7% of the requested rate change,” the insurer UnitedHealthcare wrote in its rate filing with New York state, according to the Peterson-KFF report.

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Cohen is a 38-year-old Las Vegas resident with autism and has dual enrollment in Medicaid and Medicare. He said he’s very concerned that he could lose his Medicaid coverage once work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks take effect in January, under congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“When you’re going to some providers, notably mental health, once a month, or in the case of one provider, a couple of times a week, those copays quickly add up,” Cohen said.

Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo is running for reelection against Democratic state Attorney General Aaron Ford in one of to be decided in November. Lombardo has , but healthcare policy changes made by the Trump administration are working against him with voters like Cohen in the swing state.

Those changes include Medicaid funding cuts that are expected to strain state budgets, along with new work requirement and eligibility rules for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food assistance for low-income families. The changes are expected to increase the number of people without health insurance nationwide by an estimated and decrease the number of people who receive SNAP by from 2025 to 2034.

People across the U.S. have also been feeling the pinch of rising health insurance premiums since Congress allowed enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire at the end of last year. Many who purchase health plans on the ACA marketplace have chosen less expensive plans with less coverage or are going without insurance altogether.

These changes will have a significant impact in Nevada, where tourism, hospitality, and gaming are cornerstones of the state’s economy. Nearly are self-employed, independent contractors, or freelancers without employer-sponsored health insurance benefits. Many purchase insurance through the state’s ACA health exchange, in enrollment this year after a record 110,000 people signed up for 2025.

Even before the federal changes, Nevada’s 11.4% uninsurance rate was already the , according to data from 2024. A in May that an estimated 70,000 Nevadans could lose their Medicaid coverage under the new rules. Around in the state lost access to SNAP in May.

“This is going to come down to an affordability election, and that’s going to hurt the Republicans,” said , a professor in the political science department at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

In a national this year, two-thirds of respondents said they were worried about affording healthcare, more than said the same about food and groceries, housing, or gas. And more than half said their healthcare costs had increased in the past year. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

While most respondents said that healthcare costs will influence whom they vote for in November, the issue was more pressing among Democrats and independents.

Competitive gubernatorial races are also underway in Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, with all those races .

The Democratic Party has the edge on healthcare issues over Republicans, but about 3 in 10 voters reported that they don’t trust either party, noted Liz Hamel, a senior vice president and the director of public opinion and survey research at KFF.

“It’s not an overwhelming advantage,” she said.

Not Your Textbook Republican Governor

Lombardo’s campaign his support for a children’s hospital set to be built in Las Vegas; his consolidation of the state’s Medicaid program, ACA marketplace, and public employee benefits program into a single agency; and the expansion of the number of community behavioral health centers in the state during his term.

Before running for governor and unseating Democrat Steve Sisolak in 2022, Lombardo served eight years as sheriff in Nevada’s Clark County. Before that he spent with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

Lombardo has taken healthcare stances in his first term that diverge from the typical Republican playbook. For example, that he would oppose a national abortion ban, and in 2023 he prohibiting state agencies from cooperating with other states seeking to prosecute people for traveling to Nevada to get an abortion.

The governor also signed bills into law in 2023 that from engaging in gender discrimination and to ensure greater protections for transgender and nonbinary people, including setting standards for medical care and mental health treatment.

More recently, Lombardo has taken actions more aligned with the Make America Great Again movement. In 2025, he that would have created protections for clinicians who provide gender-affirming care. This year, he to ban transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.

Lombardo’s campaign declined to make the governor available for an interview for this report. In a with Jon Ralston, CEO of the nonprofit news outlet The Nevada Independent, Lombardo said he was surprised during his first term as governor by how “complicated” and “encompassing” healthcare is, and by the “cost of it.”

“Government seems to complicate some of those bigger processes more often than not,” Lombardo said, “but in this case, they’re instrumental in the success or failure of healthcare and how people suffer as a result of bad decisions.”

His opponent, Ford, began his political career as a Nevada state senator and became the state’s first Black attorney general in 2019.

Ford has talked about how he raised his eldest son on his own while attending Texas A&M University. He said he relied on public benefits such as Section 8 housing, Medicaid, food stamps, and the Women, Infants and Children program to provide for them.

He said because of those experiences, his thoughts go to the Nevadans expected to lose Medicaid coverage whenever he hears a reference to the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

“It hits me differently,” Ford said.

His campaign’s calls for lowering prescription drug costs, boosting awareness of the state’s public-option health plans that debuted this year, and canceling medical debt.

A Referendum on Trump?

Most voters who responded to KFF’s poll said they have little or no confidence in how the Trump administration is addressing the cost of living.

“It seems like, if anything, the Trump administration’s approach is not going to help Republicans in the midterms,” Hamel said. But, she added, “November is many months away. A lot of things could change.”

Lombardo appears to be distancing himself from the president amid soaring gas prices and broader affordability issues.

When Trump visited Las Vegas in April, Lombardo didn’t attend the event. The governor later that he would be meeting with the president during his visit, but they spoke only by phone. Damore said he doesn’t think it was an accident that Lombardo didn’t appear with the president publicly.

“Lombardo has done a nice job trying to thread the needle between himself and Trump,” he said.

But Ford has an easier road ahead when it comes to campaigning for healthcare issues, Damore said.

“He just kind of has to say, ‘I’ll do better,’ and point the finger at Trump and say, ‘Where is Lombardo fighting this kind of stuff?’” Damore said. “That’s a pretty easy campaign for him.”

Partisan Nevada voters are nearly evenly split between the two parties, but the majority are registered as nonpartisans, probably because the state’s makes “nonpartisan” the default option for residents who register at the Department of Motor Vehicles. As of last year, voters can no longer choose a party at the DMV, instead needing to fill out paperwork their county election office mails after they register.

Clark County, home to Las Vegas and of , leans Democratic. The next-largest county by population is Washoe County, which is home to Reno and is the in the state. The rest of the state is rural and consistently votes Republican.

But voters in Nevada are fatigued, Damore said, after years of inflation and rising costs since the covid pandemic.

“People are just kind of surly,” he said. “They keep kind of ping-ponging back and forth between the parties. It doesn’t seem to change much.”

Cohen, the Las Vegas voter, is a registered nonpartisan. He said he plans to vote for Ford because he is the candidate who seems most willing to work to protect Medicaid enrollees.

“Sometimes the only way to get something done, to protect it, is to sue,” Cohen said. “I think he’ll bring that background.”

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The measure is unlikely to pass in the Republican-controlled Congress, but Democrats could use the vote against their opponents on the campaign trail.

When the ACA rule was released in May, the Trump administration as a means to combat enrollment fraud, lower premiums for some people, and offer a wider range of insurance plans, including ones with no set network of doctors or hospitals.

But many Democrats warned the changes would hurt consumers already suffering from high healthcare costs as well as higher prices for gas, groceries, and other household needs. Estimates from the administration found the regulation, called a notice of benefit and payment parameters, could cause to lose ACA coverage.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow Democratic Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon plan to introduce on Wednesday a to block the rule.

Baldwin told Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News in a statement that the rule is “misguided” and said she was “committed to doing everything she can” to stop Republicans from “kicking Americans off their health care.”

The directive from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is an annual exercise that sets standards for ACA coverage during the coming year. Some of the changes in the finalized 2027 rule are technical, but many would affect consumers directly.

They include tighter income verification requirements. The rule also stipulates more eligibility checks on people applying outside of the normal annual enrollment period for such reasons as marriage, divorce, or loss of job-based coverage.

ACA plans themselves would look different too. Insurers would be able to offer some plans with 30% higher out-of-pocket limits (the amount consumers may have to pay each year in cost sharing such as copayments and deductibles), with a new ceiling as high as $15,600 for individual coverage or $31,200 for a family plan.

The Democrats’ effort to overturn the rule is the definition of a long shot; it would need a majority of votes in both the House and the Senate. But simply forcing a floor vote is likely to be seen as a win by the minority party.

“What Democrats are trying to do is get Republicans to vote on policies that would be unpopular if they rose to the level of public consciousness,” said Adrianna McIntyre, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Democrats want to showcase that they want to change these policies, even if don’t have the votes to accomplish it.”

Congress has authority under the review act — enacted as part of a larger law in 1996 — to overturn rules issued by federal agencies. such disapproval resolutions have passed, hundreds have been introduced, often mainly to draw attention to an issue.

It is one of the few levers a minority party has to force action on the floor of the Senate.

That’s because if only 30 senators sign a discharge petition to send the measure to the floor, the Democrats get a vote, without needing to go through a Republican-controlled committee or hold a hearing. A companion resolution is expected to be introduced in the House on June 17.

And there’s no doubt that Democrats will try to use any floor vote on health costs as a litmus test for Republicans in the November elections.

“Time and again Democrats have used Republican efforts to undermine the ACA to their political advantage in campaigns, and this year will be no different,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

Polls show that the GOP could be vulnerable if Democrats can convince voters their party would do better on health costs, which are a top concern among voters.

, for example, found that 73% of adults see healthcare costs as a very big problem for the country, leading both inflation and the federal budget deficit. KFF’s tracking polls have found healthcare costs to be a top concern, even among Make America Healthy Again supporters allied with President Donald Trump.

At least half of people who identify as MAHA voters say those health costs on their decision to vote and which party they support.

Medical costs in general typically rise faster than inflation, driven by increased hospital and doctor bills and use of drugs, devices, and other healthcare. That leads to higher costs for employers that offer health plans to their workers and for taxpayer-supported programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, as well as higher premiums for insurance plans sold under the ACA. The consultancy PwC projects the cost to treat patients this year will , the highest in nearly two decades.

Higher premiums and lower subsidies also hit many ACA enrollees this year, with about 1.2 million fewer sign-ups than for 2025 as of January.

Costs “are a good Democratic talking point,” said Joseph Antos, a former government health official who is now a senior fellow emeritus at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “Trump was going to solve inflation, and instead, what do we have?”

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But in December, that changed. The Tobiassens decided to cancel their insurance when Rebecca saw the cost of their monthly premiums would jump from $130 to more than $550.

“It makes no sense,” she said. “It’s not worth it anymore.”

The couple own and are the only employees of a small auto shop just west of Appalachian State University in the North Carolina mountains. Rebecca worries about her husband, whose work as a mechanic can be dangerous. A spring once shot a metal ball joint into their garage wall like a gun. A heavy object crushed Ross’ thumb. In 2020, Ross became mostly blind in one eye after repeatedly getting metal shards in it and developing an infection in his cornea.

The Tobiassens are among the Americans who canceled their ACA coverage after Congress allowed enhanced tax credits that helped pay for insurance plans to expire at the end of 2025. The Tobiassens benefited from those tax credits — like expected to drop or be dropped from their coverage as the year progresses, unable to keep up with the higher costs.

Established by the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act during the covid pandemic, the expanded subsidies reduced monthly premiums for many families and prompted a tidal wave of new sign-ups, doubling ACA enrollment to .

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is expected to on how many people are no longer covered under the ACA, but an , citing Wakely Consulting Group research, showed enrollment could drop from over 22 million at the end of 2025 to as low as 16.5 million in 2026. 

In North Carolina, individual ACA sign-ups for 2026 were down 22% compared with the year before, a greater drop than any other state, amounting to a decrease of more than 213,000 people, . While the Tobiassens’ two teenage daughters remain on Medicaid, Rebecca said the new prices showed that the federal government doesn’t care about families like hers.

“We’ve known that you don’t care about us,” she said, “but you’re making it plain and simple now.”

The couple’s insurance hadn’t helped them cover all their medical needs. When the pain from Ross’ eye infection worsened five years ago, Rebecca insisted he go to a specialist, who told them that fixing the eye through cornea replacement surgery and require Ross to take six months off.

Ross chose a less expensive treatment to kill nerves in the eye instead.

The couple know they’re taking a risk by not being insured. If something were to happen, they could face an enormous medical bill.

Ross, 47, said the blindness in the one eye doesn’t significantly affect his job. He works long hours, sometimes into the night to keep up with demand.

“I try not to think about it too much,” he said. “I just work.”

Uninsured, With No Backup Plan, After Obamacare Became Unaffordable

Rebecca Tobiassen, 44  
Sugar Grove, North Carolina 

Rebecca Tobiassen owns a small auto repair shop with her husband, Ross, in the western North Carolina mountains. She says their family could no longer afford Affordable Care Act insurance after tax credits expired last year and their monthly premiums shot up from $130 to more than $550. They have no immediate plans to sign up for coverage elsewhere and are saving up for out-of-pocket expenses instead. “We just need to be able to afford to get help when we seriously hurt ourselves,” she said of the U.S. healthcare system. 

Katie Alexander oversees volunteers for Pisgah Legal Services, a western North Carolina nonprofit that helps low-income people secure health insurance. Alexander has helped North Carolina and Tennessee residents try to get ACA marketplace plans since Obamacare’s launch. She said she’s never seen anything like this year. 

Nearly 100 Pisgah clients, out of about 700 that Alexander’s team worked with during open enrollment, decided to drop insurance this year, and many others chose cheaper ACA plans with less coverage, Alexander said. 

Alexander said the people who have dropped their coverage include Lyft and Uber drivers. They’re trying to start their own businesses. They are artists and people who can work only part-time, because they’re chronically ill. Some are unable to get insurance through their employers, or they make too much to be on Medicaid.

“Even for folks who don’t have chronic illnesses,” Alexander said, “there’s just this nagging at the back of your mind, kind of constantly, of: ‘Don’t get hurt. Don’t get sick. Because you can’t afford that.’”

ACA premiums and deductibles steadily increased for years starting in 2022, then spiked during the enrollment period for 2026 plans, . The Tobiassens have seen every dip and rise in plan costs since 2014 when the plans launched. They joined immediately and paid about $30 a month, Rebecca Tobiassen said.  

“You actually felt like you were benefiting,” she said.

But through the years as the marketplace became more expensive, the couple made concessions, switching at one point from a silver plan — historically the — to a bronze. The plan mostly provided for the couple’s basic needs.

As they saw their deductibles and premiums rise over more than a decade, Rebecca feared the day would come when they could no longer afford even the cheapest plan.

“Plans are unaffordable, no matter how you cut it,” said , a healthcare policy researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine. “It’s just who is shouldering the unaffordability.” 

Gidwani and health economist , in a , found that most bronze plans, the cheapest ACA options for many, would be unaffordable without subsidies for the average person using the federal healthcare coverage.

Without subsidies, many families using these plans don’t make enough to afford premiums or deductibles, Gidwani’s research shows.

People who drop health insurance also change what’s known as the “risk pool,” Gidwani said, when a group of people share financial hazards. 

If healthier people drop out of the risk pool, fewer people subsidize the people who get sick, Gidwani said. That means premiums for the people who get sick will increase again in the future, she added.

“That becomes what we call a death spiral,” Gidwani said.

Even if the subsidies hadn’t expired, taxpayers would have borne an estimated over the next decade to cover them, Gidwani’s study noted.

After dropping coverage they’d relied on for 11 years, the Tobiassens have no plans to return to the ACA marketplace. They looked into alternative options through a faith-based healthcare organization but decided to go without.

For now, they don’t have a plan B. They’ve set aside some money for a medical emergency. And if their savings run out, Rebecca Tobiassen said, they have a couple of last resorts to lean on: credit cards or family members.

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When Congress allowed covid-era subsidies for health insurance to expire, California used its own funds to offset the hike in Obamacare premium costs for residents with low incomes.

But the reach has been limited.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom negotiates his last budget with the legislature, the Democrat wants to offer financial help to more than 1 in 4 enrollees in Covered California, the nation’s largest state-run health insurance marketplace. Democratic lawmakers, who hold a supermajority, are still debating the plan.

“My budget proposal would KEEP $0 monthly plans for low-income Californians to help clean up the financial disaster Trump created,” Newsom , where he often chides the president and GOP Congress.

have put up their own funds to keep Affordable Care Act plans affordable and residents insured as the rising cost of healthcare has emerged as a among voters. Newsom’s $300 million proposal would make California’s program among the most generous, but even the nation’s richest state can’t patch a left by the expiration of enhanced subsides at the end of last year.

“The gap between what people can pay in their monthly budget and what health insurance costs is so big that it’s a lot for states to take on,” said , a senior research fellow at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “They’re going to have to figure out how they can finance that.”

New Mexico lawmakers have of the lost federal subsidies with state money. It seems to have worked; New Mexico saw in marketplace enrollment this year, but state analysts that the subsidy program isn’t sustainable.

and , which, like California, tax residents , are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to keep premium payments low. Their hope, healthcare experts say, is to avoid the exodus seen in states such as Georgia that didn’t offer enrollees help.

Since the enhanced subsidies expired, have seen their premium payments increase by $65 a month on average.

Conservatives including have long argued that the subsidy expansion was too generous to high-income enrollees and .

“There are never enough subsidies to make health insurance affordable because subsidies are the problem,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “They are causing people to turn a blind eye to fraud and waste and excessive prices because it’s someone else’s money that they’re spending, not their own.”

Helping the Poorest?

People who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid got relief starting in January after Newsom and legislators softened the blow for about 300,000 of the lowest-income enrollees. They offset lost federal premium tax credits for individuals who last year and partially filled the gap for those who earned up to $25,823.

The governor now wants to expand subsidies to those who earn up to $31,920 this year for an individual and $66,000 for a family of four — an estimated 218,000 additional people.

Veronica and William Walter, who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, earn less than $40,000 a year in one of the nation’s most expensive regions. They’re counting on a more generous state healthcare tax credit if they have to pay for health insurance next year.

A car accident two years ago left William temporarily disabled, qualifying the couple for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

Now he’s back at work as a security guard, and Veronica said she’s worried they’ll be kicked off Medi-Cal. She’s even more worried about how they’ll get by with federal premium tax credits not nearly as generous as before.

“Without it, we’re going to be facing worse problems than we have now,” she said. Under Newsom’s proposal, Veronica and others in the highest eligible income bracket could receive an average monthly subsidy of $36 a person.

“For them, $36 a month is the sort of thing that can make a difference between keeping coverage and losing coverage,” said Peter Lee, former executive director of Covered California. “We can’t fix everything with that gap, but we can focus the dollars on those who need it most.”

The Walter family, though, may still face a nearly $200 monthly premium payment to cover both of them, $130 more than they previously paid for healthcare and prescriptions through Covered California.

“I can’t afford that, not really,” said Veronica, a pet sitter who works part-time at a school. “A giant state like this with this many people, and this many resources? You can’t just leave the people with nothing for healthcare or healthcare they can’t afford.”

California policy researchers and health advocates acknowledge the limits of a partial subsidy but say that concentrating funds on those who earn less is the most efficient way to maximize impact. People who drop coverage are , healthier, and less likely to have high healthcare costs — all factors that help stabilize the insurance risk pool. Without coverage, Lee said, they’re also more likely to experience debt from medical emergencies or leave unpaid hospital bills that strain the .

Cary Sanders, senior policy director at the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, a health advocacy group, said the state’s move last year kept low-income enrollment in Covered California steady and reduced racial disparities in coverage.

“It’s working; it’s just that it’s not enough,” Sanders said. “We need the federal subsidies back.”

Still No Help for Many

When Congress passed enhanced subsidies in 2021, it capped monthly premium payments for even the highest earners at 8.5% of income. Those temporary enhancements allowed about 8 million Americans to choose robust plans with no monthly premium payment last year and helped double Obamacare enrollment to of 24 million.

At the end of last year, 22 million of them lost that help when the GOP-led Congress blocked the extension.

The pressures on Obamacare enrollees don’t stop at premiums. Federal legislation Republicans passed last summer known as the also shortens enrollment windows, tightens income verification requirements for subsidies, and requires enrollees who earn more than they projected to pay back the full amount.

Even if Newsom’s proposal passes, most Covered California customers won’t get state help. Nearly 1 million enrollees — 52% — earn above the $31,300-a-year individual earning cutoff.

Victoria Garzouzi was one of many middle-income retirees hit with one of the most extreme premium increases: The monthly payment for her low-level bronze plan jumped eightfold to $1,600.

To make ends meet, she came out of retirement and dipped into her savings. “I’m working to pay for my insurance,” she said. “I am an army of one.”

Despite a $6,000 deductible, her health insurance premium payment is more than the mortgage on her two-bedroom house. She’s putting off a needed cataract surgery until October, when she turns 65 and qualifies for Medicare.

While GOP leaders have not publicly weighed in on the state subsidies, some Democratic lawmakers have questioned why more help hasn’t been proposed.

Assembly member Dawn Addis, who chairs the chamber’s budget subcommittee on health, suggested Newsom could tap an additional $230 million from a fund for healthcare cost relief — money raised from a state penalty levied on those who can afford to enroll in health insurance but choose not to.

Lawmakers have previously criticized state officials for socking away much of the penalty revenue, which was supposed to go toward healthcare affordability. After California discontinued its premium subsidies thanks to increased federal assistance, the Newsom administration said the state was saving to help consumers once those temporary subsidies expired. Instead, California borrowed from the subsidy fund to cover state budget shortfalls, to the tune of $771 million. Starting this year, the subsidy fund should see an influx of cash as the state pays back the loan.

At a May legislative hearing, Joseph Donaldson, then a Department of Finance analyst, said maintaining the reserve was a prudent and financially sustainable approach.

Dylan Roby, a public health professor at the University of California-Irvine who consults for Covered California, said the focus on lower-income enrollees is deliberate. They qualify for federal subsidies that higher earners don’t, maximizing federal investment and strengthening the broader system.

“You end up with more advanced premium tax credits flowing into the state that you would have been leaving on the table,” he said.

State lawmakers have until June 15 to pass a state budget. Then, Covered California’s board would decide eligibility and benefit amounts, a decision that could come this summer, with new subsidies starting Jan. 1.

Even with the extra help, Walter and her husband worry they won’t be able to afford a potential $200 monthly premium payment. Walter said she’d likely have to rely on free clinics or ration medications.

“I take so many pills, I rattle,” she said. “That, on top of the $200? For us, it really adds up.”

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Sign-ups were already down in January by about from last year’s . For this year, enrollees then faced premiums that increased, on average, . On top of that, subsidies that help people purchase coverage shrank or vanished.

Now experts are watching how many of the approximately 23 million people who enrolled will fail to pay their share of premiums.

While available data on premium payments is mainly from January, a few states that run their own ACA markets have released information for later months. The sharpest drop in people paying premiums, based on limited data, is , which saw a 28% drop in April compared with the same period a year ago, according to an analysis by Charles Gaba, a healthcare policy analyst and blogger who specializes in the ACA.

The news website NOTUS that it had internal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data showing that roughly 21% of people using the federal ACA marketplace — — failed to pay their share of January premiums, which, if correct, is far higher than at the same time last year.

CMS did not answer questions from Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News about the enrollment data.

In looking at the early numbers analysts released, “we can’t yet quantify how much worse it will be than in previous years, but it will absolutely be worse because of the sticker shock,” said Ellen Montz, a managing director with the Manatt Health consultancy, who helped oversee the ACA during her tenure with the Biden administration.

The initial results come amid rising public concern about affordability, that are often .

A KFF analysis , for instance, found that the average ACA plan deductible saw the steepest increase in history — growing by 37%, or over $1,000, from $2,759 in 2025 to $3,786 in 2026 as enhanced premium tax credits expired.

Those rising costs pose a political challenge for President Donald Trump and the broader GOP, which has opposed enhanced subsidies to help people purchase Obamacare coverage. Republican lawmakers also passed a spending package last year — enacted as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that included provisions expected to reduce ACA enrollment and fueling higher premiums this year.

The enrollment reductions “are real people with real consequences,” Montz said. “The Affordable Care Act is a political lightning rod, but it’s a critical component of the coverage landscape.”

Following the Numbers

Right now, the drop-off rate aligns with what some policy experts predicted, partly because Congress did not extend generous benefits that expired at the end of last year. Those enhanced subsidies had been in place since 2021.

“Overall, the individual market does appear to be trending toward a significant contraction in 2026, and may well resemble” drops projected by the , said a , an analysis arm of the HMA Co.

Based on its analysis, drawn from data provided by 75 insurers, Wakely estimates that average ACA enrollment will end up being 17% to 26% lower this year than last.

So far, the Wakely report says, an average 86% of enrollees made their first payment in January.

Failure to pay premiums varied by state. Those with the lowest drop-off rates had enacted additional help — such as backfilling part or all of the reduced subsidy amounts with state money — or experienced lower premium increases. States that run their own exchanges had higher payment rates (92%) than those served by the federal marketplace (82% to 84%).

Gaba’s initial analysis of data includes more recent numbers from nine of the 20 states that run their own Obamacare marketplaces.

“Georgia could be fairly representative” of other states that did not enact additional protections, Gaba said. For example, payment failure rates, year over year, were 11.6% as of April in New Jersey, and, as of February, 15.7% in Washington state and 8.5% in California.

Only one state in his sample — New Mexico — saw an increase in the percentage of people making premium payments, according to the latest available monthly data. Unlike most, it to fully make up for the lower federal subsidy amounts.

Enrollment figures for the ACA are never static. Traditionally, more people sign up — either through auto reenrollment or by taking initiative to shop — than actually pay premiums, so the numbers tend to be higher at the start of the year.

People drop out over the course of a year for many reasons, such as finding other coverage through a job or by marrying someone with insurance.

Cost, of course, is a factor. This year, because premiums went up and subsidies went down, many people faced what they previously paid toward their coverage.

And the Trump administration ended a special enrollment program that let low-income people enroll year-round.

drops should not be seen solely in the context of rising costs. Paragon Health Institute, a free-market think tank that has become influential among conservatives on Capitol Hill, has long argued that record enrollment numbers in recent years were fueled by fraudulent sign-ups, perhaps in the millions.

, , and policy experts took issue with the methodology Paragon used to estimate improper enrollments, saying they likely were vastly overestimated.

In a , the organization’s president, Brian Blase, doubled down on the fraud findings. Using data that detailed how many people failed to make premium payments each year, on average, from 2014 to 2019 — the year before covid emerged and two years before enhanced subsidies kicked in — he offered this prediction for 2026: About 19 million people would be enrolled by year’s end. Even at that, the note says, the “market would be 90% higher than the pre-COVID average.”

For other experts, however, the biggest explanation for falling enrollment is cost.

Some people had never experienced the ACA before the enhanced tax credits kicked in, so they faced extra sticker shock.

“In economic theory, no matter whether one is left, right, or center, it’s a simple fact that when you raise prices of something, fewer people will buy it,” said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

The Long View

The expectation of a lower enrollment trend holding up is one of the key factors likely to translate into higher cost estimates as insurers draw up 2027 rates.

For one thing, though it is still unclear how many people will stay enrolled, it is also unknown whether those enrollees will submit more medical claims than insurers projected. It’s generally thought that younger or healthier people are more likely to drop coverage when faced with growing premiums.

Secondly, there has been a sharp shift by consumers to purchase bronze-level plans, which have smaller monthly premiums but higher deductibles — the amount people must pay out-of-pocket for most treatment, except preventive care, before insurers pitch in. The found that sign-ups for bronze plans jumped from 30% to 40% of total plan selections — growing from 7.3 million in 2025 to 9.2 million people this year. Will they pay? Or will hospitals and doctors be on the hook for uncollected copays or deductibles, and then raise prices to compensate?

Insurers base their premiums, in part, on such analyses.

Another troubling factor for actuaries is the late posting of a key regulation that sets the next year’s rules for ACA health plans. The initial 2027 proposal from the Trump administration came out in mid-February and included aggressive new ideas — such as sharply increasing deductibles for certain types of ACA plans or allowing insurers to offer plans with no set networks of medical providers. It was , well into the time when insurers are calculating premiums for the following year. Many of the proposed changes, with some modifications, were approved, such as allowing for higher annual deductibles in some types of coverage.

“This is definitely a challenging year to be an actuary,” said Louise Norris, a health policy analyst for healthinsurance.org, a consumer information and referral website affiliated with Trove Group, an insurance agency.

“We know for sure that the individual market has gotten smaller and almost certainly sicker, as the people dropping coverage are more likely to be healthy.”

While they “aren’t waving huge red flags” yet, insurers are closely watching trends, said Michelle Anderson, a director at Wakely and co-author of the recent report.

Anderson does not expect an average 26% premium increase like the one seen this year.

Still, Anderson expects the ongoing uncertainty and predicted decline in enrollment, which will vary by state and insurer, to play a role in setting next year’s premium rates.

“It would not surprise me if there were some double-digit increases,” Anderson said.

Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News reporter Rachel Spears contributed to this article.

This article first appeared on Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News and is republished here under a .

That monthly total is $200 higher than what he paid last year, due in part to the expiration in December of covid pandemic-era premium tax credits. But the self-employed St. Louis property manager isn’t in any hurry to investigate a new type of coverage that might be cheaper than his marketplace plan: farm bureau health plans.

“Although I’m not a fan of rising costs, I’m not going to sacrifice coverage for my kids to save a buck,” Carlton said.

Carlton finds himself among a growing number of Americans who have confronted difficult choices because of rising Affordable Care Act premiums and other affordability issues. For instance, a found that many returning marketplace enrollees reported higher costs this year.

In addition, most expressed worry about affording routine and unexpected medical care, as well as the cost of prescription drugs. Worries were greater among those with lower incomes and chronic health conditions. And about 5% of respondents said they had switched to some type of non-ACA coverage.

Health policy experts say such concerns are giving new legs to alternative forms of coverage — for instance, farm bureau plans.

As of this year, that allow health coverage through state farm bureaus, grassroots membership organizations that advocate for the agricultural industry and rural interests. An annual membership in the bureau typically costs $30 to $50, and in many of the states anyone can join. With membership comes the option of buying into the health plan.

Plan details vary by state, but they typically share many features of marketplace plans, including coverage of a wide range of services, a broad practitioner network, and a way to file complaints.

But because states have passed laws exempting from health insurance requirements, they don’t offer many of the coverage protections provided by insurance. That means their benefits and coverage rules may be less generous or predictable than Obamacare plans.

Crucially, farm bureau plans don’t have to accept everyone who applies for coverage. People must pass underwriting first, a process in which plans evaluate applicants’ medical history and health conditions and decide whether to offer them coverage. This practice was routine before the ACA passed, and people were often rejected due to preexisting medical conditions.

Because farm bureau plans can turn down people with expensive chronic conditions or a history of cancer or other medical issues, farm bureau plans may be than unsubsidized marketplace plans, plan managers say.

As people struggle to keep family farms afloat, they may face Obamacare premiums totaling thousands of dollars a month, leading some to forgo coverage, said Missouri Farm Bureau president Garrett Hawkins.

“We’re trying to present another option,” he said.

Sowing Choices

In 2026, with the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, average ACA premium payments were estimated to for subsidized enrollees who retained their marketplace plan, according to KFF.

Last year, was one of four states that passed laws permitting farm bureau health plans. The others were , , and .

Although the number of states offering them has ticked up in recent years, farm bureau health plans aren’t new. Tennessee has been offering the coverage . Tennessee’s Farm Bureau Health Plans administers the plans in 10 of the 14 states that permit them.

In Missouri, the farm bureau offers with varying deductibles, copayments, and annual limits on out-of-pocket spending. Many of the benefits and cost-sharing amounts look like the coverage someone might get on the state health insurance exchanges or through an employer. They include emergency care and hospitalization, physician office visits, prescription drugs, free preventive care, and dental and vision services. Members have access to providers through the UnitedHealthcare Choice Plus national network.

Hawkins said he’s pleased with the interest the plans are generating. People could apply for coverage through the website starting Jan. 1, and by mid-March, 520 people had submitted applications, he said.

It’s uncertain how many of those people will clear the underwriting hurdle and buy a farm bureau plan, however. Farm bureau health plans can deny coverage for any reason. Even if coverage is offered, plans in Missouri don’t cover any for at least six or 12 months. In addition, plans may exclude coverage of any benefits related to a “known risk” for two to seven years, depending on the issue. So people with a range of conditions, such as diabetes, high cholesterol, heart problems, or successfully treated cancer, may be turned down or have to pay out-of-pocket for any related care for at least a year and possibly as long as seven years.

“People don’t like that we underwrite, but if we did everything like the ACA, we’d be just like an ACA plan,” said , general counsel and chief compliance and privacy officer at Tennessee’s Farm Bureau Health Plans. “We’re trying to be an option for folks that would otherwise not have coverage.”

Staying Rooted in Coverage

Under the Missouri law, once someone is covered by a farm bureau plan, they can’t be kicked off or charged a higher rate if they get sick. That’s also true for the nine other states where Tennessee administers the plans, Beard said.

“We do not contractually have the right to raise premiums or cancel plans based on [an individual’s] health experience,” he said.

And yet, “it can be really confusing to people” because the plans look like insurance products, but they don’t have the same protections, said , principal for policy development, access to, and quality of care at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

Someone with a history of cancer would be unlikely to get approved for a farm bureau plan in the first place, Howard said. If they were accepted, the services they might need would likely be excluded from coverage, she said.

“We’re just concerned that there’s going to be more people enrolled in these plans now because there’s so many more states that are allowing them,” Howard said.

Carlton, the self-employed property manager, knows firsthand how underwriting can limit coverage options. Before the Affordable Care Act required that anyone be accepted regardless of health status, Carlton, who has diabetes, had to buy coverage through his state’s high-risk pool, which was often the only option for people with preexisting conditions.

Meanwhile, policy experts share Howard’s concerns.

Insurance companies in the ACA marketplaces “have to offer maternity coverage, and they have to give you benefits on day one for a preexisting condition, and they can’t charge you more because you have that condition,” said , vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. This creates an uneven playing field for insurers and drives up premiums for the people who can’t get into farm bureau plans.

Farm bureau plans “get to use, you know, the standard market as a high-risk pool, essentially, if they want to,” Lueck said.

Still, with the huge jump in premiums that many people are facing for ACA coverage, it’s easy to understand the appeal of farm bureau plans.

“I’m not saying it’s a good thing that states have abdicated their regulatory responsibility here,” said , co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “I’m just saying that there are a lot of people out there who are struggling, who need health care, and simply can’t afford the premiums in these ACA marketplaces anymore.”

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More changes lie ahead that make it important for those getting subsidies in 2026 to track their income and take steps to protect against that kind of financial hit.

First, the basics of how the subsidies work.

Enrollees pay a percentage of their household income toward their health insurance premiums based on a sliding scale, ranging in 2025 from nothing for very low-income people to 8.5% at higher income levels. Subsidies, usually paid directly to insurers, cover the rest.

The income calculation done during open enrollment is an estimate of what a household thinks it will earn in the coming year. At tax time, ACA enrollees must reconcile what they received in subsidies with what they actually earned. If their income rose, they might owe some of the subsidies back.

But don’t skip filing! People who get ACA subsidies must file tax returns no matter their income, and that is becoming even more important: The Trump administration people from subsidy eligibility if they have gone two consecutive years without filing, and it is proposing lowering that to one year.

Beware Surprise Tax Bills

All enrollees who received subsidies for ACA coverage in 2025 — — need to include a special form, the , with their tax filings. That form is used to reconcile a person’s actual income with the amount of subsidies they received, information the IRS mails them on a separate, . Subsidy amounts are based in part on the income projections they made when they enrolled in their ACA plans.

And that can lead to surprises. Some may find they get money back if their income was less than they estimated. But, if their income went above their initial or updated estimates, they probably qualify for less in assistance and will have to pay money back.

Groups that help people file their taxes say it’s not always easy for people to accurately estimate their income for the year ahead, especially those who run their own businesses, work multiple jobs, or have work that comes with varying hours.

Clients will say, “I can make anywhere between $20,000 and $45,000 next year. I just don’t know,” said Katie Alexander, director of training and volunteers for the health and economic opportunity program at Pisgah Legal Services, a western North Carolina nonprofit that provides free tax and health insurance help to people with low incomes.

Still, for taxes being filed now for the 2025 tax year, on what many people must repay.

That cap is $375 for a single individual who earned less than $31,300 in 2025, or . The maximum owed under that sliding scale for people whose income is on the higher end of the range is $1,625 for an individual and $3,250 for a family.

There is no repayment cap for people earning more than four times the federal poverty level — totaling $62,600 in 2025 for an individual or $106,600 for a family of three — so they could owe back all amounts that exceeded their eligibility.

“The amount is just so staggering for folks,” Alexander said.

One woman whom Pisgah staff helped with pulling together her taxes for 2025 made just above $50,000, which was more than she initially estimated. Her repayment was capped at $1,625, Alexander said. Without that cap, she would have owed $4,000, a substantial chunk of her annual income.

Plan Ahead: The Rules Will Be Tougher Next Tax Season

Congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump last summer, . That means come next year’s tax season, there will be no sliding-scale limit to how much people could owe back in subsidies for 2026 if their income exceeds their projections.

“That’s just going to be absolutely devastating,” Alexander said.

There are at least two other things to keep in mind, both stemming from covid-era enhanced tax credits, which expired at the end of last year because Congress did not extend them. One is that the amount of household income people must pay toward their premiums this year before subsidies kick in has risen to just over 2% on the low end of the income scale and up to nearly 10% for higher-income earners.

The second is that households earning over four times the federal poverty level no longer qualify for ACA subsidies.

The biggest financial hit could be felt by enrollees whose income rises enough during the year to exceed four times the poverty level. In that case, they would owe back all the subsidies they receive in 2026.

And that could be a lot.

In 2025, for example, the average monthly premium for ACA coverage was $619, but the average enrollee received subsidies worth enough to offset all but $74 of that, according to the .

There’s another twist for some. Because the enhanced credits were not extended, people are paying, on average, double the amount toward their premiums this year, so they may be looking to add to their incomes to cover the cost. A found that 43% of people who remained enrolled in coverage this year are planning to work more hours or get additional work to cover those costs.

“That makes sense, but it can also present a risk of being eligible for less subsidy money than they thought, or even mean they would have to repay the entire tax credit,” said Cynthia Cox, senior vice president and director of the Program on the ACA at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½Ò•îl Health News.

People can update their projected income at the marketplace website as it changes during the year.

Pisgah staff are calling people they’ve worked with and saying, “Please, please, please, if your income changes, call us so we can adjust your income through the marketplace,” Alexander said.

As much as possible, keep track of income during the year. This isn’t easy, especially for workers who don’t have a job with regular paychecks.

“If you’re meeting with a CPA to talk about taxes, have a conversation to make sure you’re making enough money to afford your costs, but not too much to lose eligibility for a subsidy,” Cox said. “Contributing toward a retirement plan or a health savings account can lower part of your income that counts toward subsidy eligibility.”

Others might choose to dial back their work hours or forgo a new client contract.

“If taking that extra shift means putting you over the line of 400% of the federal poverty level and that’s going to cost you $10,000 in repayments, maybe don’t take that shift,” said Jason Levitis, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who follows ACA and tax policy issues.

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