Shalina Chatlani | (TNS) Stateline.org
Andrea Deutsch, the mayor of Narberth, Pennsylvania, and the owner of a pet store in town, doesn’t get health care coverage through either of her jobs. Instead, she is enrolled in a plan she purchased on Pennie, Pennsylvania’s health insurance exchange.
Deutsch, who has been mayor since 2018, is paid $1 per year for the job. Her annual income, from Spot’s – The Place for Paws and her investments, is about $50,000. The 57-year-old, who is diabetic, pays $638.38 per month for health care coverage — about half of the $1,272.38 she’d owe without the enhanced federal subsidies Congress and the Biden administration put in place in 2021.
But that extra help is set to expire at the end of 2025. It would cost an estimated $335 billion over the next decade to extend it — a step the Republican-controlled Congress and the Trump administration are unlikely to take as they seek budget savings to offset potential tax cuts.
States say they don’t have the money to replace the federal aid. In Pennsylvania, for example, doing so would take about $500 million per year, according to Devon Trolley, the executive director of the state’s exchange.
“That is a significant amount of money, an insurmountable amount of money,” Trolley said.
The disappearance of the federal help would make coverage unaffordable for millions of Americans, including Deutsch. She said it would be a struggle to pay double what she is paying now.
“You try not to go bankrupt by the end of your life,” Deutsch told Stateline. “You need assets to take care of yourself as you get older and to have a little bit of security.”
Enhanced subsidies
The 2010 Affordable Care Act included some subsidies to help people purchase health insurance on the exchanges created under that law. Under the enhanced subsidies that started in 2021, some people with lower incomes who qualified for the original subsidies have been getting bigger ones. And those with higher incomes,…
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