Congress let the enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits expire at the end of 2025, and the damage is now in the official numbers. A Health and Human Services report this month found 3 million fewer people had marketplace coverage in February than a year earlier. Enrollment fell from 22.1 million to 19.2 million. These are not abstractions. They are families who decided they could no longer afford the plan they had.
The reason is cost. With the enhanced credits gone, the average marketplace customer's monthly payment rose 58%, from about $113 to $178. The average deductible climbed to $3,786, more than $1,000 higher than the year before. People above four times the poverty line lost any help at all, because the old subsidy cliff came back the moment the enhanced credits lapsed. Many of them are small business owners, early retirees, and self-employed workers who do the right thing and buy their own insurance.
This was a choice. The enhanced credits started in 2021 and were extended in 2022. Congress could have extended them again last fall and chose not to. Now the people who lost coverage are one diagnosis away from medical debt or bankruptcy, and the ones who kept their plans are paying far more for it.
I am asking you to vote to restore the enhanced premium tax credits and make them retroactive so people who were priced out this year can get covered again. Health insurance should not have an expiration date set by a missed deadline in Congress.
Please bring the subsidies back and keep families covered.
