A Somewhat Wacky WSJ Editorial

I’d like to address the individual insurance market today which is prompted by a Wall Street Journal editorial that appeared in the April 4 – 5, 2026 weekend edition entitled “The Obamacare Crisis that Isn’t.”

The piece refers to important information on the CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services), link below, and suggests that the enhanced subsidies not being renewed had little impact on individual enrollment.

www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/marketplace-2026-open-enrollment-period-report-national-snapshot-2

The problem with this position is that the data is from January of this year and so this story is far from over. One would expect that many people facing much higher premiums will decide they are unaffordable and stop making premium payments. Updated and more accurate information should be available in July.

Another curious statement from the editorial is as follows:

“The CMS report shows that the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic subsidies were Democratic states.”

If one looks at the data by state, Florida has 4,538,772 enrollees in the individual market and Texas has 4,172,233. California, our most populous state, is third with 1,910,476 enrollees. Georgia is fourth with 1,301,254 and all other states have under one million.

Florida and Texas are such significant outliers with their individual enrollment populations that these states will be important to track.

No doubt the enhanced subsidies were too generous in some situations and created perverse incentives such as encouraging small businesses that had offered coverage to send their employees to the Marketplace. Nevertheless, we hate to see people lose the important protection of healthcare coverage.