Who will lose out when ACA health insurance subsidies expire?

By Alyssa Fowers

About a week into the 2025 government shutdown, I realized that most coverage brushed by the actual sticking point in Congressional negotiations with little exploration of the millions of people who would be impacted by the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. I decided that this story was worth doing because it would help readers understand why Democrats were willing to impose a government shutdown. My pitch anticipated the need for this story, and it was near-ready for publication by the time that top editors at the Post thought to request it.

For the data in some sections of this story, I relied on the knowledge and guidance of experts: in showing the geographic distribution of credits, for instance, or calculating the exact amounts my example families paid for health insurance before, during and after the credits. 

However, I wanted to go beyond the existing research to give readers a single consolidated view of who used ACA credits.  To create the waffle chart at the beginning of the piece, I used IPUMS to export microdata from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Employment Survey. That allowed me to sort the people with privately-purchased health insurance into mutually-exclusive buckets based on their affiliation with small businesses, their status as students, whether they were retired, and so on. Showing readers who used ACA credits helped to explain why it would be difficult to find affordable–or any–alternatives.