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rightachel Phipps spent sleepless nights with intense anxiety, wondering what would happen when she no longer had a job. Have health insurance.
The 63-year-old retired social worker is one of 22 million Americans enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans. Monthly premiums soar After the enhanced subsidy expires on December 31.
“I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m afraid that a catastrophic illness or accident is going to happen,” Phipps, the mother from Kennebunk, Maine, told me. independent. “I’m afraid something will happen and went bankrupt. “
if A bipartisan group of senators currently debating Failing to restore enhanced Obamacare tax credits, Phipps said she had no choice but to cancel her health insurance.
Last year, thanks to increased subsidies, Phipps’ monthly premium was $201. A year later, things were very different.
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“My husband and I were told that our premiums this year would be $2,864 per month, with an annual deductible of $7,500 per person,” Phipps said.
“We calculated that if we adopted this plan, our health care premiums and deductible expenses could cost us as much as $49,368 this year, which is approximately 45% of our annual income.”
To make matters worse, Phipps suffered from chronic respiratory disease and was being treated by a dermatologist for precancerous cells on his face.
“I don’t have insurance to cover these situations,” she said. “I can’t afford a CT scan, an X-ray or any diagnostics, which is scary.
“We’re literally two adults who have worked our entire lives – and we can’t get insurance anywhere.”
Enhanced subsidies introduced in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic are a lifeline for low- and moderate-income Americans. People with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($62,600 for one person or $128,600 for a family of four) are eligible.
Many Americans who signed up for Obamacare and benefited from now-defunct subsidies have no choice. They make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but are too young to enroll in Medicare.
Phipps and her self-employed husband signed up for a plan through the ACA marketplace in early 2025, when Phipps was forced into early retirement to care for her elderly mother, who died last year.
Even as the subsidy was extended for another three years, Phipps began working part-time at a preschool, putting her income just above the qualifying threshold.
“A lot of people are going to be missed,” she said.
Phipps wrote to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is leading Senate negotiations with Sen. Bernie Moreno, and independent Sen. Angus King late last year before the subsidies expired, calling on them to help.
“I may be one of the people you hear about that 51,000 people will die this year,” Phipps wrote to the Maine senator. She’s so angry about America’s health care system that she’s running for a seat in the Maine House of Representatives.
For Americans like Phipps who are staring down exorbitant medical bills, with a lifeline now hanging in the balance, this is an especially unsettling moment.
Dawn Wheeler spent weeks last year worrying about how to afford the treatments she frequently received for metastatic cancer. Eight years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which spread to other parts of her body.
Her original quote for 2026 was for a monthly premium of $2,700, but luckily the mother of five and her husband qualified for income-based subsidies that lowered the premium to $272.32.
Still, after pandemic-era subsidies expired, Wheeler was paying $69 a month, a jump from last year, and her deductible increased from $0 to $3,000.
“The anxiety this creates is not helpful to people like me who are battling chronic illness,” said Wheeler, who is from Edwardsville, Kansas. The Independent.
Wheeler said that at the lowest point in her life last year, she often thought about her death if she could no longer afford insurance.
“It will be a slow and painful death,” she said. “Maybe not even slow. It could be pretty fast, and that’s what people are facing.”
Wheeler receives infusions every two weeks and requires MRI and CT scans every two months so doctors can keep an eye on the cancer.
In addition to the increase in monthly premiums, the grandmother also saw out-of-pocket costs more than double for primary care visits, from $15 to $40, and from $30 to $80 for specialty visits.
“My medications, my chemo…cost thousands of dollars a month,” Wheeler said. “I’m usually out of pocket by the end of January, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen this month.”
Wheeler hit back at critics who argued the subsidy was introduced during the pandemic so people should be managing without it for five years.
“Look at your grocery bill. Look at all your bills,” she said. “Since COVID, everything has gone up. We need it more than ever.”
Elsewhere, Texan Johana Scott, who is battling stage three cancer, warned earlier this month that without health insurance she “would die this year.”
scott says After subsidies expired, premiums for the same plan soared from about $200 a month to $1,725.
She said it was impossible to pay that much every month because she only made $1,200 a month. Assuming she could figure out the total, she said, she would have no money left for groceries or bills.
“I’ve been crying since December because I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “If I didn’t have insurance, I would die this year.”