The roughly 115,000 Mainers who get health insurance in the individual and small group markets will see skyrocketing rates next year.
The Maine Bureau of Insurance has approved an average increase of nearly 24% for the individual market and nearly 18% for small groups, which is for businesses with 50 or fewer employees.
Superintendent Bob Carey says the bureau was able to shave a few percentage points off insurers' proposed rates. But he says high medical and prescription costs, as well as uncertainty around federal policies, are driving the increase.
"I'm wildly concerned," Carey says. "This is a major change in the cost of health insurance for Maine people, and I'm afraid thousands of people will simply be unable to afford the increase."
For example, Carey says, a 60-year-old couple making about $90,000 a year could be paying $25,000 a year for health insurance.
"That's untenable," he says. "I don't know how people can afford to do that. So I'm afraid with these increases that we'll have more people uninsured and those people show up in hospitals and emergency rooms and have to be cared for, and it's just not a good situation."
Carey says congressional lawmakers could provide relief to consumers by extending enhanced premium tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year.
"Just as they have extended the first Trump tax cuts because they felt otherwise it would be a tax increase, not extending these enhanced premium tax credits will essentially mean a tax increase for 60,000-plus Mainers," Carey says. "So, Congress could still act and I would just encourage them to do so."
Gov. Janet Mills sent a letter to Maine's congressional delegation Thursday, urging them to extend the enhanced tax credits before the end of September.
"Timing is critical," she wrote. Mills says nearly 9,500 Mainers will lose all premium support and that "rural families, early retirees, and the self-employed will be among the hardest hit if these credits expire."
States across the country are seeing similar rate increases. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, health insurance rates in the individual market next year will increase an average of 20% in the US.
