{"id":439556,"date":"2026-01-30T21:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T21:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/439556\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T21:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T21:05:08","slug":"did-the-end-of-obamacare-subsidies-hurt-enrollment-what-the-numbers-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/439556\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the end of Obamacare subsidies hurt enrollment? What the numbers show"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than a million people have dropped health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, according to federal data released this week<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The drop comes as enhanced tax credits<\/a> that helped reduce the cost of getting health insurance expired on Dec. 31.<\/p>\n

When the credits expired, the Congressional Budget Office projected that over 2 million would drop their Obamacare coverage this year, largely because of higher costs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2025, 24.1 million Americans had coverage on the Obamacare marketplace<\/a> – this year that number is 22.9 million Americans, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services<\/a>. That\u2019s a decline of about 1.2 million people, and more consumers could drop coverage in the coming months as the data is only preliminary.<\/p>\n

\u201cOpen enrollment data released to date are of people who have selected a plan, but enrollment is not complete and coverage does not actually take effect until they pay their first month\u2019s premium,\u201d a report from the faculty of the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms said<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cInformation on paid enrollment will not be available for several months, and is expected<\/a> to show a decline, possibly meaningfully, from the number of plan selections.\u201d <\/p>\n

The expired subsidies were first given to Affordable Care Act enrollees in 2021 as a temporary measure to help Americans get through the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats in power at the time extended them, moving the expiration date to the start of 2026.<\/p>\n

With the expanded subsidies, people with higher incomes became eligible for the marketplace and the credits were expanded to cover more costs for those who were previously eligible.<\/p>\n

Of the 22.9 million Americans enrolled currently in the marketplace, about 19.6 million are returning customers and about 3.4 million are new customers. <\/p>\n

Enrollment didn\u2019t decline across the board. New Mexico saw enrollment go up by 19.5% compared to last year, the highest of any state, followed by Washington, DC, Texas and Maryland. <\/p>\n

But other states saw sharp declines, according to an analysis by Becker\u2019s<\/a>. North Carolina saw the biggest drop of 21.1% of enrollments, followed by Ohio and West Virginia. <\/p>\n

Alabama saw about 22,000 fewer enrollments this year compared to last. 455,776 people in the state get their health coverage through the marketplace.<\/p>\n

Some states, like California, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania, are still in their open enrollment period, while enrollment on the federal platform, HealthCare.gov, closed on January 15, 2026. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a million people have dropped health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, according to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-439556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}