The Alaska Legislature passed a joint resolution Tuesday urging lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to extend enhanced health insurance premium subsidies.
As the highly-anticipated Congressional budget reconciliation bill stands now, the enhanced tax credits will expire at the end of this year. If they don’t get extended, health insurance costs will go up in January for many Alaskans.
As many as 23,000 Alaskans would see their health insurance premiums rise, in some cases by four or five times, if Congress doesn’t act, said Rep. Genevieve Mina, the Anchorage Democrat who introduced House Joint Resolution 9.
“Depending on your household size and how much you make, people will see really big increases on their premiums,” Mina said. “And this issue significantly impacts a bracket of people who run their own business and oftentimes have health care access through the marketplace.”
Some Alaskans could be forced to find a different job that offers health insurance, Mina said.
The Affordable Care Act, sometimes called Obamacare, subsidized health insurance premiums for low-income Americans. The addition of enhanced tax credits – initially through the American Rescue Plan Act and extended through the Inflation Reduction Act – increased those subsidies and added them for middle-class people making up to four times the federal poverty level. This year in Alaska, that was an annual income of about $78,000.
The resolution from Alaska lawmakers says losing enhanced subsidies would force some Alaskans to choose between health care and other basic needs, like housing and food, and would increase “reliance on state-funded assistance programs and emergency medical services.” It says that would strain the state budget and resources.
Part of Mina’s motivation for introducing the resolution is to show that there’s support in the state for the Affordable Care Act, not just from individuals but legislators, too, she said. That’s in a state with some of the highest health care costs in the world.
“It really should not be a political issue,” Mina said. “If you look at the numbers, Alaskans will get hurt the most by the expiration of these tax credits.”
The enhanced subsidies could be extended through the Congressional budget reconciliation process, Mina said. They aren’t written into the current version of the bill, she said, but it’s still being modified, and there could be other ways Congress might extend the subsidies.
The resolution will be sent to President Donald Trump and Alaska’s Congressional delegation.
