Margot Sanger-Katz

And it's not clear whether it can pass the Senate.

So for now, it looks like these subsidies are going to expire and a lot of people are going to have to pay more for their health insurance.

So if you will indulge me, I think it makes sense to go back in time a little bit and talk about Obamacare.

Definitely.

So when Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, they set up a system where people who don't get their insurance through work or through a government program have access to a market.

And if they make less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level—

That's like $63,000 this year.

It might sound like a lot, 400%, but that is— For a single person, it's like $63,000.

For a larger family, you might be talking about $100,000.

If you make less than that, you get some help buying your insurance, and it's on a sort of sliding scale.

So the poorer you are, the more help you get.

And the idea was to make insurance affordable for people who didn't have it.

But over time, what a lot of the authors of the Affordable Care Act realized is that the health insurance was still kind of expensive for these people who are uninsured.

So going into the pandemic, there were around 12 million people who were signed up for Obamacare plans.

That was less than everyone had expected when the bill passed.

And so when the pandemic happened and there was this real openness to spending more money by the federal government, Democrats revisited those original subsidies and they topped them off with new subsidies that made the payments even more generous and asked people to pay even less of the total bill for their health coverage.

So what did those more generous subsidies look like?

So under the system that Democrats passed during the pandemic, basically everyone who buys insurance in this market got more financial help.

But there are two groups that I think benefited particularly.

One group was the poorest Americans in this market.