The Health Insurance Cost Crisis Is Now Upon Us

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) 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 to prevent flight delays. There have been vindictive cuts to spending projects 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 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 (House Republicans’ main vehicle to end the shutdown is totally out of date, and they still aren’t coming back to fix it.)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 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, 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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