The end of expanded subsidies for the Affordable Care Act exchanges means more people will go without health insurance, workers, doctors, and researchers said.
Open enrollment is under way for 2026 insurance coverage, and millions of Americans are facing extreme sticker shock thanks to the end of expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, which capped Obamacare premiums for a “benchmark” insurance plan at 8.5 percent of income. Twenty-two million people relied on that funding, at a cost of about $35 billion annually.
With the expanded subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, reverting back to a less generous subsidy level last in place in 2021, patients around the country are facing premium increases that are so extreme, they’re either reducing health insurance coverage or dropping it altogether. Some are facing price hikes many multiples higher than they paid last year; those whose costs only doubled told the Prospect they considered themselves lucky by comparison.
It screws up the entire economy and society, too. If you can’t afford insurance, you certainly can’t afford the hospital bills. And that’s taking money and resources from people that are actually doing something good for society. And it stresses a system that’s already limited, which is why the emergency room always has a multi-hour wait. And it stresses your job, because you need an unplanned absence.
What the actual fuck.
ER employee here, multi-hour wait times aren’t caused by people without insurance seeking care, they’re caused by admitted patients taking up all the ER rooms. The ER would function great even with pretty substantial patient volumes because many of the primary-care tier complaints can be seen and discharged relatively quickly, many not needing anything more than a closet to speak in private for 10 minutes and imaging or prescription. In the hospital I work at, and every hospital in the city, and probably every hospital in your city, the floor that holds the most non-ER patients is the ER.
The reason for this is because shit runs downhill, and there’s not enough inpatient infrastructure because it’s expensive during the summer to have excess beds not in use just to have a reserve for flu season. This matters because even nonprofit hospitals are run to make money to pay our CEO ~50x more than the lowest paid employee, which- while a respectable ratio compared to most- is wholly unnecessary. nobody needs a multimillion a year paycheck except perhaps pediatric surgeons with a good bedside manner.