#uninsured-rates

#uninsured-rates

The affordability crisis is hitting rural America hard. Across the country, broadband, electricity, and clean water remain out of reach for far too many families.

Kaiser Permanente has been steadily shrinking its local office presence in recent years, contributing to quieter streets and struggling small businesses in the city's core.

Many of the medicines on TrumpRx include brand-name drugs that patients can find cheaper elsewhere as generics. For instance, Protonix for heartburn is available for $200 on TrumpRx, but the generic version, pantoprazole, costs less than $30 with a GoodRx coupon.

"This argues for the need to sustain such policies and shows that it is possible to right the wrongs retroactively, which is a powerful idea," said Kenneth Michelson, MD, MPH, associate professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Emergency Medicine and a co-author of the study.

Congress has kept key drug assistance funding at $900.3 million annually since 2014. New enrollments for state programs jumped 30% from 2022 to 2024, in part because states cut off pandemic-era Medicaid assistance. As of January, at least 18 states have pulled back their Ryan White AIDS Drug Assistance Programs, known as ADAPs, in some way.

Because of budget cuts, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has ended clinical services at seven of its public health clinic sites. As of Feb. 27, the county is no longer providing services such as vaccinations, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, or tuberculosis diagnosis and specialty TB care at the affected locations, according to county officials and a department fact sheet.

In light of the systemic dismantling of America's public health agencies, these moves essentially create a shadow infrastructure to maintain some of what is being lost. While this is a promising development, it does nothing to stop a troubling trend that has been emerging for some time: The country is quickly becoming fragmented along partisan lines when it comes to public health.

Doctors told us my grandson wouldn't live past three months, but they didn't know Elijah was capable of. Today he's 7 years old, stubborn as ever and fighting every day to prove them wrong. Elijah was born with cerebral palsy. Caring for him is a full-time, all-hands-on-deck operation that includes in-home nurses, physical and occupational therapy, school support and a small pharmacy's worth of medications.

If you're smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, should you expect society to pay when you get sick?" He added that while Americans would always have the right to "eat donuts all day," nevertheless, "should you then expect society to care for you when you predictably get very sick at the same level as somebody who was born with a congenital illness?

The issue is particularly critical right now for people who have insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Prices for those plans have skyrocketed this year after Congress failed to extend critical tax credits. Without those credits, monthly premiums for ACA plans have, on average, more than doubled. Early data on ACA enrollments for 2026 not only suggests that fewer people are signing up for the plans, but also that those who are enrolling are often choosing bronze plans, which are high-deductible plans.

The most significant immediate change arrived Jan. 1 with the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, which help defray the cost of monthly premiums for Americans enrolled in plans sold by health insurance exchanges such as Covered California. RELATED: Bay Area Affordable Care Act policyholders brace for price hikes With Congress not renewing these subsidies, which arrived in 2021 and are in addition to the initial income-based credits made available under the Affordable Care Act, enrollees will see their payments increase significantly this year.

In 2026, the US healthcare system is changing. Enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies have expired, causing premiums for marketplace plans to spike - and pricing some families out of health insurance entirely. President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will reduce coverage for some patients with Medicaid and funding for hospitals, especially those in rural areas. Costs for Medicare and private insurance are also rising: Employer-based healthcare premiums have increased by 9%, the largest rise in more than a decade.