Florida has more marketplace enrollees than any state in the country. Florida's own insurance regulator approved 2026 rates averaging $867 a month against last year's $648. This is the document that number lives in, the provision that caused it, who eats the difference, and the dates you have to act by.

You are going to open a renewal notice, and there is going to be a number on it that does not look like last year's number. Before you decide the insurance company did it to you personally, it is worth knowing that the increase was approved months ago, in a table published by the State of Florida, and that the thing that caused it was not a rate filing at all. It was a sentence in the tax code that expired because nobody voted to keep it.

So we are going to ask the two questions this show always asks. Who decided it should go. And who got paid.

The receipt is a Florida table, not a national talking point

The number comes from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, which is the state agency that has to approve what carriers charge you. Its individual-market rate table for plan year 2026 lists eighteen companies with their file log numbers, their network types, and what each of them was cleared to charge. At the bottom of that table is the statewide weighted average: $648 a month in 2025, $867 a month in 2026, a 34.1 percent increase.

That is a gross, pre-subsidy number. It is what the coverage costs before anybody's tax credit touches it. That is $219 a month more on the statewide weighted average, which is $2,628 over a year. It is an average across the 2025 enrollment base, and the table says so in its own footnote: the percent changes "are based on actual 2025 enrollment and do not represent the percent difference for a single policyholder." Your renewal notice will carry its own number, and this is the size of the thing it is coming out of.

The average hides how uneven it is. In the same table, Health First Commercial Plans came in at 24.8 percent. Sunshine State Health Plan came in at 51.6 percent. Molina was at 43.6, Centene Venture Company Florida at 40.6, AmeriHealth Caritas at 39.9. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, the state's biggest name, went from $866 to $1,144. Which carrier is on your card is the difference between a bad year and a genuinely unaffordable one, and that is not something you chose knowing this was coming.

Read the file log numbers in that table. Every one of those increases went through a filing, got reviewed, and got a stamp. Nothing about this was a surprise to the people whose job it is to know.

Why It Costs You

Here is the part that makes this a Florida story and not a Washington one.

Florida is the largest marketplace in the country and it is not close. KFF's compilation of the CMS open-enrollment plan-selection files puts Florida at 4,538,772 plan selections for 2026, against 23,130,860 nationally. That is roughly one in five marketplace enrollees in the United States, living in one state. Texas, the next largest, is at 4,172,233. California, with twice the reputation for this, is at 1,927,371.

So when a federal subsidy provision lapses, the math lands hardest on Florida. Not because Florida legislated anything, but because Florida has the most people standing in the room when the ceiling comes down. This state is one of the ten that never adopted the Medicaid expansion, against 41 that did, which is the other half of why so many working Floridians are on the marketplace in the first place instead of on a public program or an employer plan.

And the count is already falling. The same files show Florida going from 4,735,415 plan selections in 2025 to 4,538,772 in 2026, a loss of 196,643, down 4.2 percent. Nationally the drop was 4.9 percent, from 24,319,713. Those are people who did not renew a plan they had.

That is the currency. Not a percentage in a headline. A person who had a card in their wallet in January and does not have one now.

How the Machine Works

The mechanism is one clause, and you can go read it.

Section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code is the premium tax credit, the thing that decides how much of your premium you actually pay. In 2021 Congress temporarily rewrote the sliding scale inside it, so that the credits were larger and the income cliff at 400 percent of the federal poverty line stopped cutting people off entirely. In 2022 the Inflation Reduction Act extended that rewrite. It did not make it permanent.

Open the statute and find subsection (b)(3)(A)(iii). The heading is "Temporary percentages for 2021 through 2025." The text applies it to any taxable year "beginning after December 31, 2020, and before January 1, 2026." The amendment notes underneath record exactly how it got there: Public Law 117-169, section 12001, substituting "2021 through 2025" for "2021 and 2022."

That is the whole event. A date in a parenthetical arrived, and the enhanced credits stopped on December 31, 2025. No vote was taken to end them. A vote simply was not taken to continue them, which in Congress is the same outcome with better deniability attached.

Everything downstream follows from that. When credits shrink, the healthiest and cheapest customers are the first to walk, because they are the ones for whom the math stops working while they still feel fine. The people who stay are, on average, sicker. Carriers price for the pool they expect to have, not the pool they had. The Congressional Budget Office traced exactly this in Federal Subsidies for Health Insurance, 2026 to 2036, which projects that "average monthly enrollment in the marketplaces will decline from 22 million in 2025 to 17 million in 2026," a decline it says "reflects expected responses by insurers and individuals to the expiration of the expanded premium tax credit and to the implementation of provisions of the 2025 reconciliation act." On premiums, CBO names the same mechanism and attaches it to this year: the average benchmark premium "increased sharply in 2026, largely driven by the disproportionate disenrollment of healthier marketplace enrollees after the expiration of the expanded premium tax credit," along with higher-than-expected claims costs and insurers' uncertainty about policy changes.

So the 34.1 percent is not the disease. It is the fever. The rate filings are carriers correctly forecasting a worse risk pool, which is the honest actuarial response to a subsidy that was allowed to run out. Blaming your carrier for the number on your notice is aiming at the wrong floor of the building.

The Strongest Version of the Other Side

The administration's position, as reported, is that the enrollment decline is largely the removal of improper or fraudulent sign-ups, and that a meaningful share of subsidy recipients had higher incomes than the program was designed for. That second point is not nothing. The 2021 rewrite deliberately removed the 400-percent-of-poverty cliff, which by design extended credits to households that had not previously qualified. If you think a subsidy should stop at a defined income, then some of what expired is a policy you opposed, expiring on schedule, exactly as written.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the story where I could hand you a quote and you would believe it. No named, dated, verbatim CMS or HHS statement of that position could be obtained, and the underlying report was not located. So this is the administration's general position as characterized in reporting, and this show does not put it in quotation marks.

My one-line counter: fraud does not have a price tag stamped by an insurance regulator. Thirty-four point one percent does, and it is on a Florida table with eighteen companies' file numbers next to it.

What You Can Actually Do

Deadlines first, because they are the only part of this you control.

HealthCare.gov's dates and deadlines page currently carries the notice that open enrollment for 2027 coverage starts November 1, and lays out the ladder:

  • November 1 is the first day you can enroll, renew, or change plans.
  • December 15 is the last day to enroll or change for coverage that starts January 1.
  • January 15 is when open enrollment ends. After that you need a Special Enrollment Period, which requires a qualifying life event.
  • Enroll between December 16 and January 15 and your coverage starts February 1, which means a month of exposure you did not plan for.

The glossary entry states the window plainly as November 1 through January 15.

Now the practical part, and none of it is advice about which plan to buy.

Do not auto-renew without looking. Auto-renewal is the single most expensive default in this system. Your current plan repricing at 34 percent does not mean every plan did; the OIR table shows a twenty-seven-point spread between the cheapest and the steepest increase. The plan that was the best deal for you in 2025 is not automatically the best deal in 2027.

Run your actual income number. The credit is calculated off your estimated household income for the coverage year, not last year's. If your income changed, the credit changes with it, and people routinely leave money on the table by carrying forward a stale estimate.

Check whether your household qualifies for Medicaid or CHIP, which unlike marketplace plans you can apply for at any time of year.

Get free help from a person whose job is not selling you a plan. HealthCare.gov's Find Local Help tool lists navigators and assisters by ZIP. Navigators work under grants from the marketplace itself, and the rule that governs them, 45 CFR 155.210, bars them from taking any payment from an insurer in connection with enrolling you.

Read your carrier's letter for the network, not just the premium. A cheaper 2027 plan that drops your doctor is a cost that shows up later, in a different column.

The So-What

The story you are going to be told this fall is that health insurance got expensive. That is passive voice doing a lot of work.

Health insurance in Florida got expensive because a provision with an expiration date in it reached its expiration date, in the state with more marketplace enrollees than any other, and the cost of not renewing it was pushed onto four and a half million people who never got a vote on the calendar. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation wrote the consequence down in a table. Eighteen companies. Two columns. Six hundred forty-eight dollars, then eight hundred sixty-seven.

Nobody had to do anything to make that happen. That is what makes it worth understanding. The most expensive things this country does to working people are increasingly things it does by simply letting a date pass.

That is not a policy failure with a side effect. That is the point.

Come back for the rest

We do this every week. If you want the receipts before the next quiet robbery clears the statute book, The Long Pour is where they land. Pull up a chair, pour something cold, and let us send you the documents while they still matter.

Related from this desk: The Poverty Tax on what it costs to be broke in Florida, and Where Political Donations Go on who is paid to let a date pass.

The Receipts

  • Individual PPACA Market Monthly Premiums for Plan Year 2026 (Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, plan year 2026 approved filings, 18 companies; accessed September 4, 2026): the $648 to $867 statewide weighted average, the 34.1 percent, and every carrier figure.
  • Marketplace Open Enrollment Plan Selections (KFF State Health Facts, compiling the CMS Marketplace Open Enrollment Public Use Files, 2025 and 2026; accessed September 4, 2026): Florida 4,735,415 to 4,538,772, national 24,319,713 to 23,130,860, and the state ranking.
  • Status of State Medicaid Expansion Decisions (KFF, state expansion tracker; accessed September 4, 2026): Florida listed as not adopted, one of 10 states against 41 that adopted.
  • 26 U.S.C. § 36B (Internal Revenue Code, subsec. (b)(3)(A)(iii) and amendment notes to Pub. L. 117-169, § 12001; accessed September 4, 2026): the enhanced credits' text and their December 31, 2025 expiration.
  • Federal Subsidies for Health Insurance, 2026 to 2036 (Congressional Budget Office, July 2026; accessed September 4, 2026): enrollment falling from 22 million to 17 million, and the sharp 2026 benchmark increase attributed to healthier enrollees disenrolling.
  • When can you get health insurance? (HealthCare.gov, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; accessed September 4, 2026): open enrollment for 2027 starting November 1 and the December 15 / January 1 / January 15 / February 1 ladder.
  • Open Enrollment Period (HealthCare.gov glossary, CMS; accessed September 4, 2026): the November 1 to January 15 window as the agency states it.
  • Find Local Help (HealthCare.gov, CMS; accessed September 4, 2026): the locator for free local application help by ZIP, named in the action section.
  • 45 CFR § 155.210 (Code of Federal Regulations, Navigator program standards, subsec. (a) and (d)(4); accessed September 7, 2026): (a) has the Exchange "awards grants" to run the program; (d)(4) bars a Navigator from "any consideration" from an issuer tied to enrollment.