Obamacare health insurance premiums will explode to unprecedented levels when the program’s “temporary” Biden-era COVID-19-related tax subsidies expire on December 31, according to a new data analysis published by a left-wing advocacy group known as Protect Our Care (POC).

The report, titled “The Trump-GOP Premium Disaster Strikes the Nation,” claims that “millions of Americans caught in the Trump-GOP premium disaster are experiencing what no one ever should. They are logging onto the [Affordable Care Act/Obamacare] ACA marketplace for open enrollment and witnessing Republicans double, triple, even quadruple their health insurance premiums. What ensues is a GOP health care affordability crisis where everyone, everywhere, pays the price.”

Typical of the more than 100 examples of huge premium increases the study authors claim to have found are these:

“A 60-year-old couple making $85,000 a year in Key Largo, Florida, will be forced to pay $4,801 more a month and $57,613 more a year — more than two-thirds of their annual income — to stay on the same health plan next year.

“A middle-class family of four in Carbondale, Illinois, will be forced to pay $3,220 more a month and $38,642 more a year — nearly one-third of their annual income — to stay on the same health plan next year.”

Such costly premium hikes are the direct result, according to the study, of President Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives’ approval earlier this year of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) of 2025.

The OBBBA affirms the December expiration date that then-President Joe Biden and Democratic congressional majorities added to the original legislation establishing Obamacare. The subsidies were expanded in 2021 under Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act during the COVID pandemic and were then extended to the December date in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.

The POC’s leadership features multiple prominent Democratic strategists and officials, such as the group’s founder and chairman, Leslie Dach, who the group explains “served in the Obama Administration as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and as the Department’s global Ebola coordinator.”

Similarly, Brad Woodhouse, POC’s president, “is a longtime Democratic strategist, having previously served as president of some of the nation’s leading progressive groups, including Correct the Record, American Bridge 21st Century, and Americans United for Change. Woodhouse took on these roles after a five-year (2008 to 2013) run as a senior strategist for the Obama campaign and Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee.”

The POC is an affiliate of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a secretive liberal 501(C)(4) “dark money” group that gave more than $23 million to left-wing and Democratic candidates in 2024, including an average of $5,200 to Democratic senators and representatives, according to opensecrets.org.

Capital Research Center (CRC) Vice President Kristen Eastlick told The Washington Stand that POC’s organizational linkage makes clear its ideological roots.

“There are multiple pro-Obamacare campaigns and pop-up groups that may give the impression multiple voices are working to defend Obamacare, but in reality, each is just a separate tactic of the same consulting firm. Protect Our Care, a group that once described itself as a ‘dedicated war room for the ACA,’ is one of many pop-up campaigns operated by the Arabella-managed Sixteen Thirty Fund,” Eastlick said.

A group known as Health Care For America Now, which was also managed by the Sixteen Thirty Fund, “was the main Obamacare advocate during the campaign to secure its passage. The Sixteen Thirty Fund then launched new pop-up groups during the first Trump administration to lobby against any changes” to Obamacare, Eastlick said.

But health care experts and long-time critics of Obamacare told TWS the skyrocketing of premiums post-subsidies are a product of the multi-faceted failures of Obamacare to deliver what President Barack Obama promised when he first proposed the program in 2010 — lower health care costs and more efficient delivery of health care services.

Huge premium hikes are nothing new with Obamacare, according to Robert Moffit, senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing. Moffit served as deputy assistant secretary for Legislation at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Ronald Reagan, as well as assistant director for Congressional Relations at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

“Premiums exploded in 2014, the very first year of Obamacare’s implementation. In 11 states, individual market premiums for 27-year-old enrollees more than doubled over what they were in 2013; in 13 states, premiums for 50-year-old enrollees jumped by more than 50%,” Moffit said.

Those increases happened because, among multiple causes, Obamacare mandated a large, complicated, and expensive basic benefits package, and the program failed to recognize the incredible diversity of personal health care needs and preferences, Moffit said.

“Papering over premium cost increases with taxpayer subsidies is not cost control; it is merely an attempt to hide and perpetuate a policy failure to control cost. Of course, the big insurance companies made out like bandits,” he added.

Economic Policy Innovation Center Vice President Brittany Madni told TWS the POC analysis is based on “obvious cherry-picking of mismatched data to advance a pre-determined pro-Obamacare narrative. This is unsurprising given it was released by a group of former Obama administration officials who have a vested interest in preserving their legacy legislation. Unfortunately for them and for the American people, that legacy is now revealed to be massively unaffordable.”

The fundamental problem, Madni contended, is the fact that “we would not even be talking about needing subsidies if Obamacare worked. The truth is, premiums are increasing because of Obamacare’s structure, full of schemes to pay insurance companies more as they raise their rates and expand government control instead of prioritizing access to affordable, quality care.”

Similarly, during November 19 testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Paragon Health Institute President Brian Blasé told lawmakers that Obamacare’s basic structure of reliance on third-party payment is the heart of the problem of rising premium costs, not the solution to it.

“Historically, government programs and tax policy have encouraged third-party payment of health services. Thus, for the vast majority of health care transactions, individuals do not directly spend their own money but instead rely on government programs or their insurance plans, which are generally either directly subsidized or tax-favored,” Paragon testified.

“Insurance should protect people from catastrophic expenses — not function as a pre-paid medical subscription for every routine or shoppable service. Yet, federal policy pushes precisely that model, severing the link between patients and prices, eroding incentives to economize, and converting everyday spending into bloated third-party transactions,” he said.

During the same committee hearing, Urban Institute Senior Fellow Jason Levitas defended the tax subsidies and argued that, while far from perfect, Obamacare has been successful on multiple major counts.

“Between 2020 and 2025, marketplace benchmark premiums grew by an average annual rate of just 2% — slower than employer-sponsored insurance and inflation, both of which grew at around 5% annually. Individual market premiums are now comparable with those for group coverage, or even a bit lower,” Levitas testified.

“The uninsured rate has trended downward, reaching a historical low of 8% in 2024. Insurer competition is strong, with at least three insurers competing in markets serving 97% of enrollees in 2025. Public support for the ACA has doubled, from 33% in late 2013 to 64% today,” he continued.

While Levitas acknowledged that “overall health care prices are still too high,” he contended that “the growth of health spending as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) finally slowed its relentless growth. After growing from 13.3% in 2000 to 17.2% in 2009, it has flattened out since then, sitting at 17.6% in 2023. More remains to be done, but the growth of spending has slowed since the ACA became law.”

Health care market analysts were predicting higher premiums in 2026 even before the recent record-long federal government shutdown. The shutdown followed the refusal of Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), to accept a Republican continuing resolution (CR) that would have kept spending at current levels through November 21 while Congress completed work on nine remaining major appropriations bills.

In an August 6 projection, the Health System Tracker of the Petersen Center for Health Care and the Kaiser Family Foundation said premiums would increase “by about 20 percent in 2026. Based on a more detailed analysis of available documents from insurers in 19 states and the District of Columbia, like in prior years, growth in health care prices stood out as a key factor driving costs in 2026.”