Cantwell warns of rising health insurance premiums in 2026
The ACA was passed by a 60 vote Democrat supermajority in the Senate in 2010, passed by the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives, and signed by a Democrat President. Oddly, today, Democrats now blame the Republicans for the ACA failure. As a brain injured idiot, I do not understand how that would work – but whatever.
15 years since it passed, neither party has proposed any meaningful solutions to the core problems. Congress does not care – they only care about grandstanding and telling lies. As of October 2025, the Federal government has been shut down over this issue. Neither party has shown an interest in solving the root cause problems.
Prior to 2021, subsidies were limited to a decreasing, sliding scale, for those with household income up to 400% of the regional poverty level. This had no relationship to ACA premiums, of course. Premiums are determined by age, geographic location and smoking status and had nothing to do with the regional poverty level. The result was (really) situations where a married 64 year old couple with $65k in annual income was faced with $50,000 annual insurance premiums (I have the screen snapshots of the HealthCare.gov policy quotes).
In 2021, Congress decided to expand subsidies – this because the ACA itself defined unaffordable as being more than 8.05% of one’s annual income. By then, essentially everyone in the ACA marketplace was faced with premiums exceeding – typically by a lot – the 8.05% cutoff. Plus, ACA policies have very high deductibles.
In our last year on ACA, in 2024, our unsubsidized monthly premium was about $2,000 per month for a Bronze policy having an individual deductible of $9,600 or a family deductible of $19,200 per month.
This means if you had significant health issues during the year, your out-of-pocket expenses would be $2k x 12 or $24,000 for premiums, plus $9,600 for the individual deductible (or $19,200 if multiple family members affected). That comes to about $34,000 per year out of pocket. The average household income in the U.S. as of 2025 is about $62,000 per year…
The ACA failed for multiple reasons – one is that the pre-ACA 35-state run “high risk insurance pools” (covering very expensive patients) was merged into the small individual market, causing the individual market to become a single, somewhat larger, high risk/high-cost insurance pool. An estimated 25% of the 2010-era uninsured had pre-existing conditions – and some portion of this group ended up in the small individual market pools as well.
Sadly, neither Democrats nor Republicans have cared – in the 11 years since the ACA took effect – to fix any of the core problems. Subsidies are a bandaid that, as implemented, further the rise of health insurance and health care costs.
The ACA failed to lower costs – and in fact, it caused prices to rise at a slightly faster rate than before.
