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Tunisia proposes 50% insurance subsidy for Africa exports
Tunisia plans to cover 50% of the insurance premiums for business exports to African markets under its proposed 2027 budget bill, with the provisions applying for 12 months after the law takes effect…
CT offers health insurance subsidy to early childhood educators
More than 7,000 early childhood educators in Connecticut without health insurance can now sign up for state-subsidized coverage.
CT launches health insurance subsidy for child care workers
Connecticut officials on Wednesday announced that eligible staff in the early childhood sector can now apply for a subsidy toward health insurance plan premiums, a benefit connected to the ambitious […]
CT to make healthcare subsidy available to childcare workers
Eligible childcare workers can receive money annually toward insurance premiums for Access Health CT plans.
Rx for Virginians’ health, one grocery bag at a time
The Trump administration’s cuts to SNAP are sending an estimated 130,000 vulnerable Virginians off the food subsidy program. A network of nearly 100 food pharmacies in Virginia is struggling to fill the gap – and provide families with healthy produce and food.
CT offers $1,200 health insurance subsidy to child care workers
About 18% of the 31,000 working early childhood educators in Connecticut are uninsured, according to a 2026 study.
CT offers $1,200 health insurance subsidy to child care workers
About 18% of the 31,000 working early childhood educators in Connecticut are uninsured, according to a 2026 study.
Oklahoma healthcare costs surge with premiums rising up to 75%
Oklahoma healthcare costs are rising sharply, with insurance premiums increasing up to 75% due to federal subsidy expirations and climbing medical expenses.
Pa. approves steep rate hikes for 2027 Pennie health insurance plans
Pennsylvanians who buy health insurance on the state’s Affordable Care Act marketplace — called Pennie — are set to see another year of sharp rate hikes as state regulators approved double-digit increases for 2027. The Pennsylvania Insurance Department, responsible for analyzing and approving rate proposals by insurance companies, announced that
Health Insurance Will Cost A Lot More In 2027. Here’s How To Pay Less
Health insurance costs rise again in 2027. A physician explains open enrollment deadlines, the ACA subsidy cliff, Medicare drug plan changes and what to check by Dec. 15.
Your Employer's Health Plan Is the Single Largest Tax Break in America, and It Never Shows Up on Your Return
The biggest tax break most American workers receive never appears on their return, never gets debated at filing time, and quietly delivers a bigger federal subsidy to higher earners than anything they could ever itemize.
Catch 22: Californians can't afford health insurance but face fines if they drop it
For one Californian, the state subsidy contributed $1 a month to her $600 premium. She considered dropping coverage but faced a $1,600 penalty.
He Claimed Social Security at 62 to Pay His Health Premium. The Benefit Pushed Him Over the Marketplace Subsidy Cliff.
Starting Social Security at 62 to cover health insurance sounds like a clean solution, but the new check can quietly trigger a cost that wipes out the very subsidy it was meant to fund.
CT to spend $10 million to continue health care subsidies for paraeducators
Connecticut is spending $10 million this academic year to continue a health care subsidy program for public school paraeducators.
Chinese e-commerce moves to next phase after delivery price war changes shopping habits
China's meal-delivery subsidy war may have ebbed but its biggest legacy could be a shift in consumer expectations, as electronics, flowers and even medicine can now be delivered within an hour of ordering.
A temporary COVID-era subsidy helped Americans afford health care. Then it vanished
Congress let enhanced ACA subsidies expire after months of political gridlock. Millions now face premiums they can no longer afford
Entertainment unions intensify campaign for corporate tax handouts as film subsidy race to the bottom accelerates
As public funds bankroll corporate relocation, entertainment unions enforce the competitive framework and suppress a unified struggle against job destruction.
The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized
Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA
The Federal Government’s $33.6 Trillion Health Care Problem
The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest report on federal health-insurance subsidies estimates the federal government will subsidize health coverage by approximately $2.4 trillion in 2026, by $3.9 trillion by 2036, and by a total of $33.6 trillion over the intervening decade. For all the focus on health care costs in the United States, CBO’s new […]
Trump administration to end Medicare Part D subsidy program in 2027
The prescription drug benefit is used by millions of seniors.
The Trump administration is halting a Medicare drug subsidy. Will premiums rise?
A temporary subsidy that reduced monthly premiums will end, and insurance companies are examining the impact.
California’s Business Tax Credit Cap Needs More Targeted Changes
California’s scramble to rework its business tax credit cap shows that the state is directionally correct to resist subsidy bidding wars but wrong to rewrite the economics of credits already issued after companies have already relied on them, writes Andrew Leahey.
CT early childhood educators eligible for new health insurance subsidy in 2027
Many early childhood educators in Connecticut will soon be eligible for help from the state to pay for health insurance.
CT early childhood educators are eligible for a new health insurance subsidy in 2027
An estimated 5,600 of Connecticut's 31,000 early care and education workers don't have health insurance, according to a recent study by Access Health CT.
Michigan Business Development Program’s deals are plentiful; its results are not
Subsidy workhorse sets modest goals and fails to meet them
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION ENDOWMENT ADVISORY BOARD APPROVES HEALTH INSURANCE SUBISIDY PROGRAM FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION ENDOWMENT ADVISORY BOARD APPROVES HEALTH INSURANCE SUBSIDY PROGRAM FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 25, 2026 The Early Childhood Education Endowment’s Advisory Board voted on Tuesday to approve the new early childhood educator health insurance subsidy program beginning in 2027 and available through Access Health CT open enrollment starting October 23, 2026. Established into law…
Records: Rural Michigan ‘overlooked’ in Michigan’s $6B subsidy spending spree
A Bridge analysis finds that the northeast Lower Peninsula got $71 per person in economic development spending since 2022, compared to $854 in west Michigan. Some question the disparities.
RFK Jr. pans processed food during visit to Charlotte's Country Mill
Secretary of Health and Human Services visited mid-Michigan on Tuesday, June 16, to tout Trump administration policies that require more fresh foods to be offered through food subsidy programs.
Business leaders use their voices to advocate for child care
North Carolina's business leaders are joining forces to advocate for a child care subsidy reimbursement floor.
Vermont sees drop in health insurance enrollment after subsidy cuts
Learn about the impact of the federal budget bill HR.1 on Vermont's healthcare system, including loss of subsidies and changes to Medicaid eligibility.
The healthcare subsidy paradox
For Millions the choice is no longer about selecting a healthcare plan that meets their medical needs; instead, must choose only what they can afford.
That ACA subsidy isn’t free money. It could cost you at tax time.
If your income exceeds the amount you estimated, you will probably qualify for less in assistance and will have to pay money back.
The ACA health coverage subsidy lapse hit 22 million people. Here are some of their stories
The lapse of enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act marketplace insurance has forced families to make difficult financial choices.
Tens of thousands of Californians pay more for health insurance this year after subsidy cuts
Tens of thousands of middle-class Californians now face higher health insurance premiums after Congress let enhanced federal subsidies expire Dec. 31.
CT health plan subsidies set to be available beginning Feb. 1
Access Health CT said it will launch an enrollment period Feb. 1 for eligible customers to enroll in coverage with the new state subsidy.
Final day to select ACA health plans arrives in most states, with no subsidy deal yet
The open enrollment window ends Thursday in most states for plans that start in February.
House passes health subsidy renewal in win for Democrats
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday passed Democratic-backed legislation that would restore expired health insurance subsidies.
Business, state lawmaker groups call child care subsidy bill vital to Nebraska workforce
State business and lawmaker groups call a proposed child care subsidy bill vital to stability of Nebraska's workforce.
Over Republican objections, US House poised to pass health subsidy renewal
The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday was poised to pass Democratic-backed legislation that would restore expired healthcare subsidies, as millions of Americans face significant price hikes for coverage.
House takes step toward extending Affordable Care Act subsidies, overpowering GOP leadership
The House is pushing ahead with legislation to renew subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans. A bipartisan coalition in the House overpowered Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday to push forward a measure that would revive the enhanced subsidy.
Rancho Cordova approves $940,000 subsidy for proposed sports and entertainment arena
ACA subsidy cuts to hit Texas border counties the hardest
In the Rio Grande Valley, 98% of ACA enrollees received an advanced premium tax credit that lowered their monthly payments. Those subsidies will decrease Jan. 1.
ACA Subsidy Expiration Leaves Millions Facing Higher Health Insurance Costs
Hand on Government: Rising health insurance costs and subsidy expiration threaten coverage for 1.5 million Floridians
As 2026 approaches, affordability remains a dominant concern for Americans, with health insurance costs poised to rise sharply, especially in Florida. Government law attorney Chris Hand explained on This Week in Jacksonville that the end of COVID-era subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could have severe consequences.
Four GOP lawmakers break with leadership, force vote on ACA subsidy extension
Drama unfolded on Capitol Hill Wednesday
House passes GOP health care bill without ObamaCare subsidy extension
House Republicans on Wednesday passed a partisan package of health care policies designed to provide a conservative alternative to extending the expiring ObamaCare subsidies. The legislation …
House advances GOP health care package that doesn’t include ObamaCare subsidy extension
The House advanced a GOP health care bill Wednesday, even as moderate Republicans signed a Democratic discharge petition to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies in an act of defiance against le…
ACA subsidy fraud is 'rampant,' Republicans say. Some health policy experts disagree
The GOP is pointing to a new Government Accountability Office report on subsidy fraud to argue against extending enhanced ACA subsidies.
Why affordability is the 'beating heart' of the ACA enhanced subsidy debate, health policy experts say
Health plans proposed by Senate Democrats and Republicans failed on Thursday, making it more likely enhanced ACA subsidies would expire at year end.
Trump’s push for health care plan stalls ahead of looming subsidy expiration
President Donald Trump’s push for a new health care plan has stalled, amid disagreements within the GOP over the extension of key enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, three people familiar with the matter told CNN.
Trump’s push for health care plan stalls ahead of looming subsidy expiration
President Donald Trump’s push for a new health care plan has stalled, amid disagreements within the GOP over the extension of key enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, three people familiar with the matter told CNN.