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**OCTOBER 23, 2025**

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The entire point of the government shutdown from the Democrats’ perspective was that they would squeeze Republicans with the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. Once the consequences of that expiration became clear, Republicans would not want to be saddled with the responsibility for doubling insurance costs and causing millions of people to lose coverage. That moment is no longer in the future. It’s happening now. But I’m not sure it’s totally going to work out for the Democrats, for reasons explained in this piece [link removed].

**–David Dayen, executive editor**

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Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images

The Health Insurance Cost Crisis Is Now Upon Us [link removed]

You could be forgiven for not realizing there’s a government shutdown going on, the second-longest one in U.S. history in fact. Between ICE terror campaigns, revenge prosecutions, summary executions of Caribbean (and now Pacific [link removed]) fishing boat crews, and the literal destruction of the East Wing of the White House, there isn’t a lot of bandwidth for the void of federal appropriations and the furlough of over 750,000 employees.

Republicans are very much trying to conceal the shutdown from the general public. President Trump dubiously got the troops paid, and he’s trying to figure out how to pay air traffic controllers [link removed] to prevent flight delays. There have been vindictive cuts to spending projects [link removed] in blue states and attempted layoffs of federal workers, but the layoffs have been blocked, and stopping infrastructure projects that have yearslong timelines isn’t immediately felt. The House is completely out of session, probably to prevent a 218th vote [link removed] to release the Epstein files, but also to just take the oxygen out of the room on the shutdown. It’s hard to report on an empty chamber. (House Republicans’ main vehicle to end the shutdown is totally out of date [link removed], and they still aren’t coming back to fix it.)

Both sides feel they have a strong hand politically, and while the polling on who is responsible is mostly split, the lack of salience is the key feature. The business-as-usual nature of the shutdown helps keep it going.

But you can’t hide the government from the public forever. And the accountability moment that Democrats have warned about for months is finally upon us. People are opening up their mailboxes or going online and seeing massive increases to their health insurance premiums, kicking in next year.

The new prices won’t begin until January 1, but open enrollment begins on November 1—ten days from now—and new premium rates are publicly posted [link removed] in at least a dozen states. Healthcare.gov, which 28 states use, will update prices by the beginning of next week. The average annual cost in 2025 of a family health insurance premium is $27,000 [link removed], and the failure to maintain enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act exchanges means that more middle-class and working families will have to pay a greater portion of that.

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