Health care in Idaho just got more expensive thanks to the government shutdown.
Idaho’s Affordable Care Act portal opened Thursday with new price tags, offering the nation its first glimpse at an Obamacare marketplace without federal tax credits.
The federal government has been shut down for more than 22 days, in large part over a debate on the merits of the credits. Still, neither national political party appears willing to shatter Congress’s stalemate on how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included details to slice billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid.
Now, recipients in Idaho are facing noticeably higher premiums.
“On average, gross premiums, or the overall cost of the premium, has gone up about 10 percent. And the net premium, or the amount the consumer pays after the tax credit has been applied, has increased about 75 percent,” Pat Kelly, executive director of Your Health Idaho, told The Hill.
“So, those are averages across all of our enrollees, but it does give an indication of overall increase and then increase to what the consumer actually pays,” he said.
The expired subsidies were created through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and allowed households making more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level to qualify for lowered premiums. (That looks like a family of four on a $128,600 salary, or a single person making $62,600, per federal guidelines.) Age and residency also factor into eligibility for the credits.
Idaho has roughly 135,000 enrollees on the marketplace, more than 6 percent of the state population. Of those, about 13,000 fall within that salary bracket and are at risk of no longer receiving the credits should Congress fail to act, according to Kelly.
Recipients in other states are similarly on the chopping block. More than a dozen states have opened up their Obamacare marketplace for a window-shopping period, including California, Georgia, Kentucky, Nevada, Maryland, and Maine. Individuals in those states could see prices rise by thousands of dollars annually. People in Wyoming, West Virginia, Connecticut, and Illinois can expect the largest differential in their monthly premiums, rising anywhere from 535 percent to nearly 700 percent, reported The Hill.
The result, according to policy experts, will be a mass exodus from Obamacare plans altogether, leaving roughly four million Americans uninsured. The spike in uninsured Americans will spur a public health problem that has historically proved to make premiums more expensive for the insured as hospitals look to recoup the lost cash.
Low-income regions of the country will be particularly hard-hit, such as Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, as recipients decide whether they can afford the rising costs.
But not everyone will see it coming. Enrollees in Idaho will be automatically reenrolled into the newly pricier plans, “potentially leaving some people unaware of the upcoming spike in their monthly costs,” reported The Hill.
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