Chicago – July 19, 2025
Health insurance premiums are going way up next year for people who buy their insurance on Healthcare.gov or the state-based marketplaces, according to an analysis out Friday.
The average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium, according to the analysis from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.
The insurers’ narrative
Summer is the time of year when health insurance companies set their rates for the following January and then submit those rates to state regulators.
Researchers at KFF then pore over those documents to make sense of what health insurance costs are going to look like for consumers in the coming year.
“These filings are usually hundreds of pages filled with math and equations,” explains one of those researchers, Cynthia Cox. “But sometimes they also add this narrative to explain why they’re raising their premiums.”
This year, instead of talking about rising drug costs or hospital charges, insurance companies were talking about federal policy, Cox says. “Pretty much every insurance company is talking about the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA markets.”
Those markets are where people go to buy Obamacare plans, which serve people who can’t get health insurance through their jobs and who don’t qualify for Medicaid or Medicare.
The enhanced subsidies started during the COVID-19 pandemic under the Biden administration and helped dramatically decrease the cost of premiums for these plans.
It turns out that people liked those lower premiums. “The number of people signing up for coverage has more than doubled,” says Cox, who directs the Program on the Affordable Care Act at KFF. In January, enrollment hit a record 24 million. That high enrollment helped drive the uninsured rate to its lowest level ever.
Now that those subsidies are going away for next year, premiums are going to spike. For example, if someone paid $60 a month for their health insurance this year, they might be looking at $105 a month next year.
People who are generally healthy might well decide that the higher premium is not worth it. They’ll go without health insurance and risk it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that letting the subsidies expire would increase the number of uninsured by 4.2 million people over the next decade.
