Caroline Gomez-Tom on ACA health plan price hikes for 2026

I'm Steven Potter for "Here& Now". >> In health care news. Affordable Care Act premiums are expected to increase sharply when people enroll, starting in November. Insurance companies are making their projections now for 2026. Rates in Wisconsin, nearly 850,000 people are enrolled in ACA plans. 12 insurers across the state that offer marketplace plans, project increases ranging from 6.6% to 34.5%, according to Health system analysts. What's driving this increase? We turn to Caroline Gomez-Tom, an enrollment manager with the covering Wisconsin program, which helps people sign up for marketplace plans. And thanks very much for being here. Frederica. >> So when you saw these projected premium hikes, what was your reaction, especially to the like 34.5% increase? >> Yeah, it was definitely a startling hike. Except we weren't necessarily surprised knowing that there were some things that were in the mix regarding enhanced premium tax credits that were going away or potentially going away. You know, Congress could still act in, you know, these several months before the end of the year and then some other policy changes that have happened at the federal level. Plus healthcare costs, rising inflation, etc, that could be a part of this. But to see the numbers that we are expecting for this year, it it took it took your breath away. >> Yeah. So these enhanced tax credits are due to expire at the end of 2025. How did those tax credits help with out-of-pocket costs? >> Yeah. So these extended tax credits, they have been in place now since 2020. And essentially they expanded really the discounts or the amount that people qualified for to lower their cost of insurance, especially for those folks that had slightly higher incomes. So that middle income range above 400% of the federal poverty level. And what that means is that people had more options to consider when they were looking at the healthcare.gov options, instead of just going directly to the lowest cost bronze plan with a crazy out of pocket cost for an individual, they could actually shop around realistically and look at the plan that may cost a little more per month, but because of those extended premiums, they could afford it, but had also lower out of pocket costs for them. >> And so did those premium tax credits. Encourage a lot more people to actually enroll? >> Absolutely. And we could see that even just this last year where we hit a milestone year in enrollment in Wisconsin, we had 313,000 people sign up, which was the highest we'd seen since the marketplace opened in 2014….