Eroding Affordable Care Act enrollment portends higher insurance rates
Enrollment in the Affordable Care Act continues to erode as some customers struggle to make premium payments, with the declining numbers churning market uncertainty for insurers. In response, insurers are likely to raise rates again next year, following this year’s larger-than-typical hikes.
Sign-ups were already down in January by about 1.2 million from last year’s record enrollment. For this year, enrollees then faced premiums that increased, on average, by 26%. On top of that, subsidies that help people purchase coverage shrank or vanished.
Now experts are watching how many of the approximately 23 million people who enrolled will fail to pay their share of premiums.
While available data on premium payments is mainly from January, a few states that run their own ACA markets have released information for later months. The sharpest drop in people paying premiums, based on limited data, is in Georgia, which saw a 28% drop in April compared with the same period a year ago, according to an analysis by Charles Gaba, a healthcare policy analyst and blogger who specializes in the ACA.
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2026/05/20/eroding-affordable-care-act-enrollment-portends-higher-insurance-rates/