Idaho delegation must deal with spiking health insurance costs | Opinion

As the federal government shutdown drags on, there’s a ticking time bomb awaiting many Idahoans. Very soon, thousands will see their health insuance premiums soar.

One deeply disingenuous claim, which thousands of Idahoans are about to learn firsthand is false, is that these are just subsidies for the well-off.

A columnist for the conservative Washington Examiner made one version of this argument Friday: “The credits temporarily lifted the income limits that disqualified those with incomes 400% above the poverty level. It also capped the monthly premium at 8.5% of a family’s income. As such, a family of four earning $128,600 could now qualify for assistance at taxpayer expense — hardly ‘poor’ by conventional standards.”

This is essentially the same talking point Rep. Mike Simpson repeated in an interview with KTVB ahead of the shutdown.

“It allows for someone who makes up to $140,000 a year to get tax credits for health care,” Simpson said. “This pulls it back to what it was originally intended. It doesn’t eliminate all the tax credits, just for those upper income groups. They’ll lose that subsidy for their health care.”

Simpson said it was necessary to make cuts because it’s time to start slashing the deficit — the deficit he just helped explode through the Big Beautiful Bill.

This subsidies-for-the-rich framing isn’t a lie exactly, but it’s obfuscation. And it’s an especially ridiculous kind of obfuscation because any day now low income Idahoans who get their insurance on the exchange are going to learn the visceral truth, when they get a piece of mail informing them that their health insurance is going though the roof.

The American Rescue Plan Act’s enhanced tax credits did two things simultaneously. As Simpson correctly pointed out, it increased the income cap for eligibility. But, at the same time, it lowered the maximum share of income that individuals have to pay for plans across all levels of income.

So is the impact of expiring credits going to be restricted to upper-middle-class households? Hardly. In fact, it will be worst for those with incomes near the federal poverty level.

The Kaiser Family Foundation raises a salient example: For an individual making $28,000 a year — maybe not in poverty but certainly in tough straits — insurance premiums are currently capped to about $325 per year. With the credits expiring, those premiums would to spike to $1,562 — nearly a five-fold increase. That’s the difference between making rent or not, paying the light bill or not. That’s the kind of increase that will lead people who really need health insurance to drop it, which is what’s expected to start happening shortly.

As Pat Kelly, executive director of Your Health Idaho, told KTVB he expects about 25,000 Idahoans to lose coverage because of the expiring credits. Sarah Cutler reported that spikes in insurance premiums will hit 100,000 Idahoans overall.

So this is a real problem, and it demands real action.

One potential compromise to reopen the government might be to remove the increased total income cap while maintaining the lower cap on the percentage of income that would be spent on premiums. That fixes Simpson’s subsidies-for-the-well-off problem without spiking insurance costs for families living paycheck to paycheck. Maybe it’s an idea he should propose.

Because if Simpson and the rest of Idaho’s congressional delegation think their voters won’t be outraged because working people’s health care costs soar while they twiddle their thumbs, they’ve been spending too much time in Washington, D.C.

Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.