Skyrocketing health insurance premiums for millions after today
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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.
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.
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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.
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