No, Obamacare Premiums Are Not Doubling

Into the debate on extending the Biden administration’s Covid subsidies for health coverage stepped Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

In an X post Monday evening, Greene claimed that “when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district.” She went on to repeat the claim that premiums would “DOUBLE” — with all caps in the original — two other times in the lengthy post.

With all due respect, that’s the exact type of framing coming from the Marxist left — and it’s also inaccurate. Premiums won’t double, by a long shot.

‘Temporary’ Subsidies Expiring

First things first: Contrary to Greene’s claim, most of the Obamacare subsidies are not expiring, for good or for ill. Only the enhanced subsidies passed by the Biden administration in 2021, and extended in 2022, will lapse effective Dec. 31. The Biden administration sold those subsidies as a “temporary” response to the Covid pandemic, but now, as with most of the Covid spending binge, Democrats want to make it permanent.

But, to Greene’s larger point, she and others — primarily leftist groups who want to keep the Obamacare bailouts going — are conflating premiums with out-of-pocket costs. The former aren’t doubling, and the latter are rising only because the expiration of the enhanced subsidies (but not the subsidies included in the original version of Obamacare) is revealing how unaffordable the “Affordable Care Act” is for consumers.

Greene’s own post implicitly admits this fact. She added a screenshot that included the following bullet point from the Kaiser Family Foundation: “If the enhanced subsidies expire, the average annual premium for subsidized enrollees could rise by 114%, from $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026.”

Doing the math shows that, under this scenario, “premiums” would rise from $74 per month to just under $159 per month next year. But if you think the full premium for health insurance comes to only $159 per month, I’ve got some land I want to sell you.

Dishonest Think Tanks

A graphic from a July 2024 Kaiser policy brief illustrates the difference in terms visually. The premium consists of the entire bar graph — the blue, green, and purple columns — while the green column shows what households actually pay out-of-pocket.

If the enhanced subsidies — the purple bar in the 2024 column — go away, a family would have to pay that amount out-of-pocket, which would get added to the green bar above it. But the federal government would still pay for the vast majority of premium costs, the blue bar in the graph. In this case, the federal government would fund “only” 78 percent of premiums, as opposed to 88 percent of the total premium under the enhanced subsidies.

Kaiser and similar groups don’t want to highlight the fact that letting the enhanced subsidies expire would mean that federal taxpayers are still paying more than three-quarters of total premiums. Democrats want to create a sense of crisis, to scare members of Congress into bailing out Obamacare. Unsurprisingly, more recent work from Kaiser has eliminated graphics showing total premiums and the sizable premium subsidies that will remain after Dec. 31, instead solely discussing the out-of-pocket effects.

Out-of-Pocket Costs Too Low?

A related principle worth remembering in this discussion: People with low, or no, out-of-pocket costs would see the highest percentage increases, which lends itself to more partisan scaremongering. By Greene’s logic, if someone’s out-of-pocket cost went from $1 per month to $3 per month, their “premiums” would TRIPLE. But in absolute terms, would $2 per month make or break a family? Not in most cases. 

It is also worth repeating that “free” insurance — that is, policies with no out-of-pocket costs per month — created by the enhanced Covid subsidies are at the heart of the many reports of Obamacare-related fraud in recent years. Given that fraud estimates from the Exchange subsidies alone range into the tens of billions of dollars per year, it’s entirely reasonable to ask people to pay something — even if it amounts to $10 or $20 per month — for their monthly health coverage, both to promote personal responsibility and to discourage fraud. 

As someone who pays over $600 per month for an Obamacare plan that is effectively useless unless I get hit by a bus, I fully recognize how unaffordable the “Affordable Care Act” has become. But throwing more taxpayer money at the problem isn’t the answer.