HealthPopuli.com – Read More
A couple of days into the U.S. Federal government shutdown, there’s one message the Congressional Democrats are tending to voice: that is that health care is on the line, and that’s the issue on which they’re betting will bring negotiators back to Capitol Hill — expecting a few Republicans to join in that dialogue.
Most U.S. adults across political parties would want to see Congress extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits that are set to expire next year we see in a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation published October 3.
And that includes most Republicans and MAGA supporters, the KFF study found. That is 57% of MAGA-identifying Republican voters, and 70% of non-MAGA Republicans.
If you thought you’d only see something like this “when pigs fly,” well, welcome to this moment — as health care is something, and perhaps maybe the only thing, that might bring us together somehow, sometime, to witness that proverbial porcine-flying moment. I’m not naive, but I do believe there are a few Republican leaders who are concerned about their constituents access to telehealth (now over the cliff), mental health services, and access to diagnostic tests soon rather than later. 
The prospect for up-spiking health care costs was discussed in another KFF publication (published 30 September), forecasting that ACA marketplace premium payments would more than double on average in 2026 if the enhanced premium tax credits expired. As the bar chart illustrates, the annual OOP premium for ACA marketplace enrollees would increase from $888 to $1,904 among people who currently receive a tax credit for their ACA health insurance plan. 
The fine print shown in Table 1 breaks out the individual premium payments by annual dollar increase based on the health citizen’s household income: at the lowest income levels 115% of the Federal Poverty Level and 141% of the FPL, the annual dollar increase for premium payments would be $378 and $794, respectively, for individuals.
At $55,000 of household income (351% FPL), the individual would be charged an additional $1,469 for their health insurance premium. 
Health Populi’s Hot Points: This last chart comes from the analysis in the KFF poll cited above.
By late September, just days before the Federal government shutdown, 4 in 10 Americans (42%) who self-purchased health insurance said they would have to go without coverage if their monthly costs doubled.
In the U.S., in the midst of the Federal government shutdown, workers’ worries about AI-stealing away jobs and job security, and grocery prices still very sticky upward, Americans are living with feelings of lower future expectations, The Conference Board quantified in its October 2025 report. As the zig-zagging line chart illustrates in the lighter blue line, Americans’ expectations of the future fall quite below peoples’ pre-pandemic visions for their future lives and livelihoods.
Kearney, a firm whose consumer spending data informs my work, updated us with third quarter 2025 consumer insights. This last chart summarizes how consumers are presently dividing time and mindsets, globally — led by mentally preparing for scarcity, followed by seeking optimization in balancing needs and wants, and finally looking for a bit of luxury in a mindset of “treatonomics” (aka “Little Treat Culture” on TikTok) (and as a timely aside, you can read about “The Treatonomics of Taylor Swift” here).
In the scarcity mindset among U.S. consumers, with people feeling their Health Citizen Muscles including folks identifying as MAGA supporters, one wonders: how might current ACA-plan member individuals and households try to balance their scarcity home economics with, potentially, a YOLO mindset — in other words, does a sum of $350 to $1500 or more dollars, per individual, fit into a treatonomics mindset?
The post Most MAGA Supporters Support Extending the Expiring ACA Tax Credits – Will That Move Negotiations to Re-Open the Government? appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.
