An Obamacare Hot Spot Where Price Spikes Pose an Outsized Threat [View all]

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/us/obamacare-price-spikes-lost-subsidies-threaten-florida.html

https://archive.ph/OoR5M

An Obamacare Hot Spot Where Price Spikes Pose an Outsized Threat
South Florida will feel some of the most intense reverberations if Congress allows the extra insurance subsidies it approved during the pandemic to expire.
By Patricia Mazzei
Oct. 25, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET

If the extra subsidies that help Americans pay for Obamacare insurance plans expire at the end of the year as expected, the most intense reverberations will be felt in South Florida, the country’s top market for the coverage.

As many as a third of the 4.7 million Floridians on Affordable Care Act plans could drop them next year because of the higher costs, according to some estimates.

The state’s demographics help explain its high demand for Obamacare: Florida is full of low-wage service and gig workers who cannot get insurance through their jobs, self-employed people and early retirees who are not yet eligible for Medicare.

It is also one of only 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income people, as allowed under the Affordable Care Act.

In Florida, the uncertainty has resulted in a political throwback of sorts. Suddenly, the state’s politicians are talking about the Affordable Care Act again, often in urgent terms, 15 years after President Barack Obama signed it into law and several election cycles after it faded as a campaign issue.

Florida politics have changed so much in that time that the former presidential battleground state is no longer considered competitive. Miami-Dade County — ground zero for Obamacare, with more than 30 percent of residents on such plans — now votes Republican, as does the state overall.

The biggest impact would be felt by older people at the lower edge of the middle class. Many people in their early 60s who earn around $65,000, for example, would experience a sharp increase in premiums — from a few hundred dollars a month to $1,000 or more.

...