MINNEAPOLIMEDIA EDITORIAL | The Price of Abandonment: Minnesota’s Looming 22% Health Crisis and the Human Cost of Federal Neglect

MINNEAPOLIMEDIA EDITORIAL | The Price of Abandonment: Minnesota’s Looming 22% Health Crisis and the Human Cost of Federal Neglect

The storm has been gathering for years. Now it is here.

Minnesota’s health insurance premiums are set to skyrocket by an average of 21.5 to 22 percent in 2026, the largest increase in nearly a decade. The Minnesota Department of Commerce confirmed what families across the state already fear: the fragile balance that kept health care affordable for working Minnesotans is collapsing.

This crisis is not an accident—it is the consequence of deliberate federal inaction. The expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, first expanded under the American Rescue Plan, will strip away a financial lifeline for nearly 90,000 Minnesotans who depend on them to keep their coverage. Starting December 31, 2025, those subsidies vanish.

For tens of thousands of households, the math is brutal. Premiums will jump by an average of $177 to $180 per month, a cost few can absorb in an economy already gasping for air. For many families, that’s a car payment, a month’s groceries, or the margin between stability and crisis.

This is not just an unpleasant data point—it is a political failure now landing squarely on Minnesota’s kitchen tables.

The Gathering Storm

This moment arrives as Minnesota continues to reel from years of economic whiplash. The pandemic may have faded from the headlines, but its scars run deep. Small businesses shuttered and never reopened. Corporate layoffs left families without incomes or insurance. Federal grants that once cushioned the state’s social programs have dried up, leaving state leaders scrambling to patch budget holes with limited resources.

Now, into this fragile recovery, Congress delivers a knockout blow. The expiration of these enhanced subsidies isn’t a fiscal necessity—it’s a choice. A conscious decision to allow the cost of care to rise for the working and middle class while protecting tax breaks for the wealthy.

This choice will reverberate far beyond spreadsheets and legislative talking points. It will determine whether a single mother can afford her medication, whether a 59-year-old tradesman too young for Medicare can afford to stay insured, and whether a family farmer can survive another unpredictable year.

As State Senator Melissa Wiklund, chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, warns: “Because of the expiration of enhanced tax credits and increases to the underlying insurance rates, more families will be priced out of coverage.”

To be “priced out” is not an abstraction. It is the quiet devastation of Minnesotans forced to weigh doctor’s visits against rent, prescriptions against food, health against survival.

A Public Health Disaster in Slow Motion

The consequences will not stop at the individual level. Over 62,000 Minnesotans are projected to lose their health coverage altogether, and another 19,000–20,000 will lose eligibility for any assistance. When people lose coverage, they do not stop needing care—they delay it. They wait until symptoms worsen, until they end up in the emergency room sicker, costlier, and harder to treat.

As physician and State Senator Matt Klein put it, “When people can’t afford to stay on insurance, they delay care until they’re even sicker. Costs of care go up, and so do rates of uncompensated care. Emergency room wait times get longer for everyone.”

This is the cruel arithmetic of federal neglect. Delayed care becomes expensive care. Unpaid hospital bills drive premiums even higher. The healthcare system—already overburdened, understaffed, and stretched thin since COVID—buckles further under the strain.

This is not just a policy failure. It is a manufactured public health crisis.

The Moral Failure of Federal Priorities

The decision to allow these tax credits to expire is more than an economic misstep—it is a moral abdication.

It is an unmistakable signal that the federal government’s priorities have shifted away from the working class toward the privileged few. It rewards wealth while punishing resilience. It hands tax relief to those who have already recovered from the pandemic, while leaving behind the very people who carried this nation through it—the nurses, teachers, small business owners, and essential workers who risked everything when the world shut down.

This premium hike must be understood as part of a broader pattern of abandonment. The steady evaporation of federal COVID-era aid and the chronic underfunding of social programs have left states like Minnesota stranded.

To its credit, the Minnesota Legislature has acted. It extended the Premium Security Plan, a reinsurance program that stabilizes the market by offsetting high-cost claims. Without it, premiums would have spiked an additional 47 percent—an unthinkable catastrophe.

But let us be clear: these are sandbags against a flood. State intervention can soften the impact, but it cannot reverse the tide of federal neglect.

The Echoes of a Pandemic Not Yet Over

The irony is painful. After enduring the worst of COVID-19, Minnesotans were told that recovery was underway—that we were building back stronger. Yet the aftershocks continue: job cuts, housing insecurity, small businesses closing, and entire industries reinventing themselves at the cost of their workers.

Many families never had a chance to rebuild savings. Many still carry medical debt from the pandemic years. And now, those same families are being told that their health coverage—once subsidized as a lifeline—is about to become unaffordable again.

This is not “fiscal discipline.” It is economic cruelty dressed in bureaucratic language.

A Call to Action: Renewal or Ruin

There is still time to change course. Congress can act—must act—to renew the enhanced premium tax credits before their expiration on December 31, 2025.

Failure to do so will mean more uninsured Minnesotans, more medical bankruptcies, more preventable deaths, and a healthcare system increasingly defined by inequity.

Minnesota has long prided itself on fairness and compassion. But compassion without action is meaningless. This is a moral imperative that transcends partisan lines: to defend the right of every Minnesotan to access affordable health care, to live without the fear that a medical bill could destroy their life’s work.

The countdown has begun. Minnesotans are urged to review their options on MNsure.org beginning November 1, but preparation is not the same as prevention.

The fight must go to Washington.

Congress must restore the enhanced tax credits—now, not after the damage is done. Anything less would be to accept the price of abandonment: a 22% crisis that will define our state’s moral and economic future for years to come.

MinneapoliMedia