You'll be shocked to learn that Obamacare rates are spiking...again. The new rate hikes haven't hit yet, but they will next year.

Affordable Care Act plan premiums will rise by 13% in 2027, the second straight year of double-digit increases in a strained market that is already facing shrinking enrollment.

Next year’s boost follows a 26% surge this year and is the second biggest rise since 2018, according to KFF, the health-research nonprofit that calculated the increase based on federal data released Friday.

The hike means an average monthly premium of about $704 for a 40-year-old buying an ACA “benchmark” plan for 2027, compared with $624 this year and around $497 in 2025. Benchmark plans are midtier products in each region that are used to set federal subsidy amounts.

The beauty of the ACA (and, yes, that's sarcasm) is that most of the people on it won't feel the change. That's because the majority of enrollees pay zero or nearly nothing for their heavily subsidized plans. If the cost goes up, the subsidies go up too.

The latest increase will add to the strain for the slice of ACA consumers who pay the full price for their plans. Most people with ACA coverage get the government subsidies, but federal support was reduced sharply at the start of this year, leading millions of people to drop out of the market.

That description is misleading. During the Biden administration, Democrats proposed and passed an emergency expansion of the program's subsidies which led to it nearly doubling the number of people who enrolled. That expansion was set, by Democrats, to expire last year. You may recall Chuck Schumer shutting down the government twice to demand Trump expand the subsidies Democrats had set to expire. So it's true federal support was reduced because it was never intended to continue. It was a temporary, COVID emergency that ended.

In any case, the average monthly cost of a plan in 2026 was about $740, but the average after subsidies was $178. And that figure includes all the people who get no subsidies, though they are a small minority. If you only look at the people who get subsidies, their average payment is $96 a month. As of 2025, about a third of all people enrolled were getting free plans. Most of the rest were getting subsidized plans. That's what Obamacare actually is. It's free or heavily discounted insurance.

The people who will feel this increase are the ones paying full price, but that only applies to about 13 percent of the total enrollment. The point is, the only reason most people stay enrolled in Obamacare is because of the subsidies. It operates as another entitlement program. 

But the NY Times offered this example of someone who will be paying $3,000 a month for the cheapest available plan. In other words, they cherry-picked an outlier paying full price.

Kate and Mark Dwyer, a couple in rural Oregon, have been wrestling with whether their budget can handle another annual increase. They had already shifted to the cheapest available Obamacare plan, leaving them on the hook for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.

Next year, the least expensive plan will increase their costs by more than $500 a month, to nearly $3,000, Ms. Dwyer said. That amounts to more than a third of her earnings at a nonprofit.

“We are looking at going without next year,” Ms. Dwyer said. “There is no middle ground. It’s either $3,000 or nothing.”

A few paragraphs later they let the Trump administration point out that this really isn't the norm.

A government fact sheet about open enrollment published shortly afterward did not mention the premium increase, but noted that three-quarters of Obamacare customers with subsidies can still find plans for less than $50 a month.

And near the end of the story we get this:

“This is a really small number of people,” said Cynthia Cox, the director of KFF’s program on the Affordable Care Act. “But these people are getting hit the hardest by rising health care costs, and they don’t get any help.”

The average cost for the cheapest bronze plan with a high deductible will be about $700 a month for a 50-year-old single person, according to Ms. Cox.

So what actual percentage of Obamacare enrollees have been paying $2,500 a month like the couple described in the story? I asked Google Gemini and it suggested only 1-2 percent of enrollees are paying this much. So, again, the Times is cherry-picking as hard as they can and then kinda-sorta admitting later in the story that the norm is something very different.

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