Margot Sanger-Katz

Then there's this kind of middle-income group.

And those people are also going to have to pay more for their insurance, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of like $150 more per month on average.

And then you get to this group earning more than $65,000.

And that is a small share of the market.

But in dollar terms, those are the people that are facing the biggest effects.

Some of those people are looking at price increases in the neighborhood of one or even $2,000 more per month without these enhanced subsidies.

Yeah, that's right.

They are looking at just absolutely huge and astronomical price increases that may be impossible for some of them to pay.

So over the last few weeks, as people in all of these income categories have been looking at their options and thinking about the ongoing drama in Washington, I think a lot of them have started to consider some really difficult choices.

Should they buy a less generous plan with a really high deductible so they don't have to pay as much?

Should they try to rearrange their work so maybe they earn less and they get right under that threshold where they could qualify for a subsidy?

Do they need to earn more money, get a second job, or cut back on some of their living expenses in order to be able to pay the premium?

And all of that has really come to a head this week when the deadline hit, the subsidies were not extended, and people had to ultimately decide what kind of insurance they were going to choose, if any insurance at all.

We don't really know for sure.

The Congressional Budget Office, so they're the nerds that help Congress figure out what their laws are going to do, they think that about 2 million more people will become uninsured in 2026 as a result of this policy and almost 4 million people over the course of the next decade.

But there are other serious analysts who have estimated a much larger impact.

Enrollment in the marketplaces has doubled since they put this policy in place in 2021.

So if you think about all of the people who newly became insured in this market, that's 12 million people.

And we're kind of snapping back to the policy from before.

Yeah, I think Democrats actually have been somewhat misleading in the way that they've been talking about it.