What Next - Healthcare Is Expensive. It’s About To Get Worse.
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
This week, Senate Democrats will hold a vote on extending expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits to try to prevent health insurance premiums from skyrocketing for millions of Americans. That vote is basically guaranteed to fail.
Where did these credits come from, and what’s likely to happen when they (almost) inevitably lapse?
Guest: Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for KFF Health News and host of the podcast “What the Health?”
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Vanta. |
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| 0:33.1 | Hi, Mary and the rest of the What's Next team. |
| 0:41.6 | Last week, I learned that when you ask Americans about their health care costs. |
| 0:46.6 | Hi, I'm just calling to let you know about my lovely insurance premiums. |
| 0:51.0 | It turns out they've got a lot to say. |
| 0:53.9 | I hope I can fit all this into the voicemail. |
| 0:59.0 | I'd asked you to tell me if open enrollment was feeling different this year, as insurance subsidies expired. |
| 1:07.0 | Different, it turns out, is one way to describe it. |
| 1:10.0 | Horrifying might be a better term. |
| 1:12.7 | My health insurance premium has gone up by 110%. |
| 1:16.9 | So again, in plain numbers, this means my costs are jumping from $450 to $970 a month. |
| 1:25.6 | And we look at the details, and the plan itself has changed so much that it literally |
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