Chapter 1: What are the reasons behind skyrocketing health insurance premiums?
The new year brings skyrocketing health insurance premiums for millions of Americans. For Marketplace, I'm Nova Safo and for David Brancaccio. Enhanced subsidies for health insurance policies on the Affordable Care Act exchanges are set to expire at the end of today. That means premiums are going up for many Obamacare enrollees. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer joins me now.
Good morning, Nancy. Good morning. So how much will premiums rise after the subsidies expire? Well, they're expected to more than double. And that's according to KFF. That's a nonpartisan health research organization. KFF says the average premium will go from $888 annually this year to around $1,900 in 2026. And who is facing the steepest premium increase?
I'm thinking the middle class likely will be most affected. Yeah, the subsidies were temporarily expanded during the pandemic to people making more than four times the poverty level. And, Nova, that's $129,000 a year for a family of four. They will be completely losing their subsidies.
And the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that about 4 million people will become uninsured after the expanded subsidies expire. And there's another hurdle here too, right, Nancy? The cost of health insurance is expected to rise next year at the same time the subsidies are shrinking. Can you walk us through why that is?
Yeah, well, some healthy people are expected to drop their insurance if it gets too expensive without the subsidies. And that leaves insurers with a smaller pool of sicker people who really can't go without insurance. Insurers are expected to charge them more because they won't have the healthier people in the insurance pool to balance them out.
Also, some insurance companies are pulling out of rural areas.
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Chapter 2: Who will be most affected by the expiration of health insurance subsidies?
And if there's no competition, the remaining carriers can charge more. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer, thank you. You're welcome. It was the summer of 1981 when a new cable TV channel debuted dedicated to music videos. Now MTV's run as a purveyor of music is coming to an end. With the new year, parent company Paramount Skydance is shutting down MTV's remaining music-only channels.
The main channel, now home to reality and culture shows, will continue. We've been looking back at the economic trends of 2025, and today it's artificial intelligence. Stock prices of the company's powering AI saw double-digit growth this year. The BBC's Will Chalk has more. 2025 started with a bang for the AI industry. Has the AI bubble burst?
The world's biggest listed company, Nvidia, slumps nearly $600 billion. In January, the emergence of a cheaper Chinese rival to ChatGPT, DeepSeek, caused chaos on the stock markets as US companies realised they weren't the only players in the game. But DeepSeek's dominance was short-lived, partly because of its ties to China and censorship. We asked it a couple of questions earlier on.
One was what happened in Tiananmen Square. It gave us this answer. I'm sorry, I can't answer that question. Trust seemed to be the main concern. Here is Ian Leslie, an author on human behaviour, speaking to us at the time. AI chatbots in general are amazing. And it speaks, if that's the word, with complete confidence.
But in some cases, it's giving you completely mistaken information and presenting it as the truth. Then there's the thorny issue of artificial intelligence and the arts, which has been in the spotlight more than ever, not least because of this. It's the most powerful imagination engine ever built.
Sora 2, which can create eerily realistic looking videos of pretty much anything you can imagine at the click of a button and put you and your friends in them too, was released in September. It made so-called AI slop easier to make than ever, but there were big concerns about copyright. Dr. Gary Marcus from New York University writes on AI. He told me it marked a fundamental shift for society.
It leaves us in a society that's going to have trust issues, because I think people are going to learn that you can't really trust video anymore, but we don't really have a replacement. We don't have a source of ground truth that people share, and I think that's going to be disruptive for society.
The big AI firms are still facing lawsuits from all around the world, largely from the people who own the copyright to the material their models are trained on. And it's playing out in a big way in the world of music. Because if you ask an AI generator to make you a song that sounds, say, like Ed Sheeran, some would argue that Ed Sheeran deserves some compensation.
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Chapter 3: What challenges arise from rising health insurance costs and shrinking subsidies?
It's an issue that came to a head when big record labels, including Warner Brothers, sued the AI music app Suno. That is, until Warner Brothers changed their mind and decided to work with them instead. Many in the music world were outraged. But some see it differently. Grammy-nominated producer Jamie Rodigan told me there are others who see the app not as a threat, but as an opportunity.
I enjoy using AI in the creative process. If I start writing a piece of music and need an idea or maybe some harmonies, I may upload a track to AI and AI throws me back some different variations or different examples of how the track could develop. So it's polarising, it's problematic and it's fraught with risks. But if 2025 proved anything, it's that AI isn't going away.
That was Will Chalk with our newsroom partners at the BBC. Mexico's new tariff policy on imports for mostly Asian countries is set to take effect with the new year. Most of those tariffs will be 35%, aligning with the U.S. The tariffs are likely to impact Chinese imports in particular. Mexico is raising trade barriers for thousands of products, including steel and automobiles and auto parts.
Those are key industries. I'm Novosafo with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM, American Public Media. Hey, everyone. You already listened to Marketplace Podcast, so you know that it's important to understand how economic forces shape our lives. And that feels especially important now as we're all trying to make sense of the latest headlines.
I'm Rima Hares, host of Marketplace's This is Uncomfortable, a show that explores how money bumps up against our relationships, our choices, and the parts of life we don't always say aloud. And starting January 15th, we are back every single week. New stories, new questions, and the kind of conversations that make you feel less alone in this quickly changing economy.
We're tackling questions like, should I turn my hobby into a money-making side hustle? How do I deal with layoff anxiety? Or what do we owe our parents financially? Don't miss an episode. Subscribe to This Is Uncomfortable from Marketplace, wherever you get your podcasts.
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