Obamacare’s enhanced subsidies could be reinstated for 2026 if politicians act in the next 300-plus days, but the clock is ticking much faster for one Florida family, who lament their latest bill.
Subsidies that ended with 2025 after helping millions of Floridians pay for their Obamacare could be restored retroactive to Jan. 1 with a stroke of President Donald Trump’s pen before the last gavel falls on this congressional term.
A Jan. 8 U.S. House vote approved a three-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies that were helping about 4.7 million Floridians afford their health insurance, either through direct payments to their insurance companies or tax credits at the end of the year.
But the Senate has yet to take up the subsidy extension and, without that chamber’s approval and Trump’s signature, the House vote for renewing the health care subsidies will expire at the end of the current congressional term, Jan. 3, 2027.
The clock is ticking much faster for Steve Reyes, a Hollywood airplane parts distributor, who doesn’t know how much longer he can keep paying his health insurance premiums which have ballooned from the $982 a month he was paying last year to the $3,430 monthly bill he’s paying in 2026 to cover his family of four.
A 250% increase in his family’s health insurance means difficult decisions may lie ahead.
“January passed and we got another bill, so I’m thinking, ‘This is not sustainable,’” he said.
By the end of the year, if he keeps up with those bills, his health insurance payments will have totaled $41,000 to ward off catastrophic health costs not counting the $10,000 deductible that’s part of his Florida Blue Obamacare plan.
Just for health care alone, Reyes is absorbing $2,500 more in expenses every month than last year. And he’s thinking something’s got to change. He’s not sure what yet, though.
“We’re looking at cutting costs wherever we can,” Reyes said. “We’re even thinking of getting out of our (work) offices.”
Florida is the most popular state for Obamacare
Last year, Floridians were signed up for government-supported Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), at a greater percentage than any other state. It’s a reflection of the state’s large number of small businesses, its gig economy and large number of younger retirees who move here before they are eligible for Medicare.
The latest numbers show just about 200,000 fewer Floridians are signed up for the 2026 insurance that takes all comers, regardless of pre-existing conditions that other, private plans do not insure for.
“Florida is being hurt more than any state by the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits,” said Holly Bullard, a policy advocate for the Florida Policy Institute, which is a nonprofit research organization. “That harm will become even more clear over the next months as more people realize they can’t afford premium payments that have skyrocketed.”
Nationally, about 1.2 million fewer people were signed up for the insurance, according to the latest figures, but experts expect the number of Obamacare enrollees will drop further because many counted as sign-ups likely had their coverage auto-renew.
South Florida U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said she’s hearing about it from her constituents as she put out a call for the U.S. Senate to act.
“Families who could once count on having access to quality, affordable health care, are now seeing it slip out of reach,” Wasserman Schultz said. “They’re being forced to forgo other necessities like groceries, childcare and monthly bills just to be able to hold on to their health care coverage.”
How do you qualify for Obamacare in Florida?
Anyone can qualify to get their insurance via the Affordable Care Act’s online platform, Healthcare.gov, although the open enrollment period for 2026 has lapsed and sign-ups now are limited to those within 60 days of a qualifying event, such as losing insurance, getting married, having a baby or moving.
What plans are available and how much it costs depends on what’s offered locally in the customer’s area and what each family’s household income is.
When the pandemic hit, President Joe Biden proposed and received approval in 2021 for enhancing government support for the health insurance plan so even those families in upper-middle class families qualified for the subsidies that either go to the insurance company or appear as a tax credit.
When the subsidies in the 2021 American Rescue Plan expired, a three-year extension of the subsidies passed in 2022. But they were set to expire Dec. 31, 2025.
President Trump and the Republican-majority Congress passed the sweeping “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in July 2025 that included administration priorities, budgeting for immigration enforcement, tax cuts and clean fuel credit changes but let the ACA enhanced subsidies expire.
What is the highest income to qualify for Obamacare subsidies?
Many Florida families still get insurance subsidies that predate the pandemic. But many middle-class households, like the Reyes family, lost their subsidy.
At an income of more than $135,000 for a family of four, they were just over the limit of qualifying — the current subsidies are limited to families making 400% of the federal poverty limit, which is $132,000 for a family of four.
With the enhanced subsidies, the Reyes family had benefited from how the Biden-era enhanced subsidies capped the cost of health insurance at consuming 8.5% of their income.
It’s coming as a shock to Reyes.
“A lot of this stuff, you don’t follow it until you have to,” Reyes said.
Will there be a return to pre-pandemic health insurance conditions?
Critics of continuing the subsidies argue that the expiration of enhanced subsidies are part of a return to normalcy — with people less dependent on the government.
Extending the enhanced subsidies would add $350 billion to the budget deficit for the next 10 years, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. Ending the subsidies will lead to an increase in the uninsured rate, the same analysis projects.
Reyes, however, looks at a spreadsheet of what he was paying between 2017 and now for his Florida Blue HMO and sees a crisis continuing independent of the government. In 2020, he was paying about $2,000 a year to cover his family of five before the pandemic subsidies kicked in. One family member is no longer on his insurance because she graduated and got a job with insurance. So why his current bill has increased 70% from the year he last had no subsidies makes no sense to him, he said.
To him, the promise of Obamacare — better bargaining power for individual policies regardless of pre-existing conditions — is not holding up. And he’d like to get insurance company executives in front of Congress testifying about why this is happening.
“Going from $1,000 a year to $3,400 with a $10,000 deductible? That’s a kick in the you-know-what,” he said.
Cristin Bishop Hopkin, chief operating officer and insurance expert for The Brokerage Inc., a Texas-based field market organization for 250,000 insurance agents, said prices have been going up because more people are using their benefits as the price of care increases.
It could get worse, she said, if more follow Aetna’s lead in 2025. That’s when they announced they were dropping ACA marketplace lines in 17 states, including Florida, that were covering 1 million policyholders.
“I fear that competition is going to be reduced in certain regions,” Bishop Hopkin said. “When competition drops, pricing power shifts big time … If you have fewer carriers in the market, you know, these carriers can start upping the premiums even higher and higher.”
Wasserman Schultz last month put out the call to the Senate and President Trump.
“What is required could not be more clear,” she said in January. “The Senate must act and get the enhanced premium tax credit and subsidies extension bill that the House passed onto President Trump’s desk immediately. They could do it this week.”
President Trump rolled out what’s being called The Great Healthcare Plan as open enrollment for ACA closed last month. No formal bill has been introduced for the plan that proposes to give Americans direct payments into health savings accounts.
Anne Geggis is statewide reporter for the USA TODAY NETWORK FLORIDA, reporting on health and senior issues. If you have news tips, please send them to [email protected]. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at https://palmbeachpost.com/newsletters..
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