Margot Sanger-Katz

And then there's a new group who actually didn't get any subsidies under the original Obamacare design, who were now under this enhanced subsidy structure getting help for the first time.

So these are people who earn more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

And, you know, this is a group that includes a lot of entrepreneurs, people who work for small businesses that can't offer insurance.

farmers and ranchers, and also early retirees who either chose to stop working early before they qualified for Medicare or maybe lost their job and were having trouble getting back into the job market and are living off their savings.

Well, I think this was a group that a lot of Democrats felt were really slipping between the cracks.

And so I think Democrats were kind of happy to come back and try to fix this program.

And it actually made a very big financial difference for some of these people.

So that's the plan that Democrats implemented in 2021.

And at first, they made it really short term.

But then they immediately saw that tons more people were signing up for coverage.

Almost all of this growth is coming from that bottom income category.

So those are the people that are

eligible for these $0 premiums.

I think there are a couple of reasons why that happened.

One is just that's a group that's much more likely to be uninsured.

If you think about the kinds of jobs that low-income people have, they're just much less likely to come with health insurance.

You know, if there's someone who has a bunch of gig economy jobs that they're patching together or a part-time job, those are the kinds of jobs generally don't have health insurance.

And so those people are really benefiting from the ability to go get a free plan somewhere else.

It's also like free is a really important horizon, it turns out.

Even asking people to pay a small amount can really discourage them and particularly low income people from enrolling in these kind of programs.