Healthcare Increases and the Effect on Rockland

Op-Ed by Elijah Reichlin-Melnick

Many in our district are at risk of losing their health coverage because Congress failed to act in time

Thousands of people in Rockland County will lose their health insurance this year unless Congressional Republicans vote to preserve vitally needed federal support for working and middle class families. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In 2009, I was working for former Congressman Eliot Engel while Congress and the country were in the midst of a major national debate about healthcare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that President Obama was championing to reduce costs and improve access to health insurance. I still remember the many conversations I had with local residents who were desperate to see the ACA pass so that they could finally afford to get health insurance. These were hard working people who were trying to do everything right but whether because they had a pre-existing condition, or worked at a job that didn’t provide insurance, or simply didn’t earn quite enough to afford the exorbitant cost of premiums, they were left uninsured, one medical emergency or unexpected illness away from financial ruin.

The Affordable Care Act made a broken system better and allowed millions of people to get health insurance by expanding Medicaid, prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, allowing people to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26, and creating a marketplace in each state where uninsured people could sign up for a health plan, with financial subsidies so that people could afford the cost of insurance. 

For years, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have tried to undo these successful reforms. Trump failed in his first term attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but in his second term, with full support from Congressional Republicans, his efforts to gut key aspects of the law, making health insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans, are close to succeeding. Now, with the ACA stripped of much of the financial support it needs to actually help New Yorkers, the improvements it brought are in jeopardy and the federal government risks throwing residents of Rockland and New York State off their insurance and further into debt.

The ‘Big, Beautiful Bill” that Congressman Mike Lawler and nearly every Republican in Congress supported cut nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid funding, and failed to include funding for the federal subsidies that make private insurance purchased through the ACA’s healthcare marketplaces affordable to regular people. This will hurt so many in our community—senior citizens who need to refill their prescriptions, young children in need of basic health access, or young adults struggling to make it on their own. 

Congress had the chance to fix some of what they broke last year with a vote earlier this month to extend the subsidies provided by the Affordable Care Act. These subsidies help people who are middle class but don’t earn enough to afford insurance (people earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level) to pay for their health insurance by lowering how much of their income goes towards paying premiums. If those subsidies were to be removed, an independent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the benchmark plan premium in New York’s 17th district would almost double, rising a whopping 92% from $445 a month to $853, an increase of $409 a month. Ask yourself, honestly, could you or most folks you know afford another $409 a month on health care?

And to be very clear, these subsidies do not just help the lowest income families. A huge number of middle class families living in our community qualify for these subsidies, and will have to pay more out of pocket or risk losing their insurance if these subsidies are not renewed. An individual making up to $62,600, a family of four making up to $128,600, or a family of six making up to $172,600 would pay more for health coverage under the state exchange, if the subsidies aren’t extended.

In a promising first step, a bipartisan majority of the House of Representatives rebuked House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Trump earlier this month, and voted to restore funding for these healthcare subsidies, but we are still waiting for the Senate to act and still not sure whether any vote now will make these subsidies retroactive to start from January 1. Our elected leaders keep kicking the can down the road, and, sadly, many families have started this year in limbo — not knowing what their premiums will be or whether they’ll even be able to afford insurance at all.

So now, we wait. Will the Senate act soon to fix this problem? Will Republicans like Congressman Lawler, who claims to care about this issue, and even sided with Democrats in a recent House vote to extend the subsidies, actually follow through and use his leverage in a narrowly divided Congress to ensure that his constituents don’t find themselves uninsured? Or was the only reason the House vote took place earlier this month because Congress is up for election this fall? 

New Yorkers aren’t asking for a lot, just basic fairness: access to health care they can afford without breaking their budget. Republicans control the federal government—they have the power to solve our affordability crisis, but instead they’re poised to make it much worse. If our elected leaders won’t consistently vote to address the cost-of-living crisis, we need to ask ourselves, “Why should we send them back to Washington, DC to represent us this November?”