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KHN’s ‘What the Health?’: Record ACA Enrollment Puts Pressure on Congress


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The Biden administration announced that 14.5 million Americans have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act for 2022. That’s a record, and several states are still enrolling people. But many millions of those newly insured could face significantly higher premiums for 2023 unless Congress extends the temporary subsidies it passed last year.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are again working to salvage parts of the president’s Build Back Better social spending bill that failed to garner enough votes to pass the Senate. Separately, lawmakers are looking to remake the federal public health apparatus to better prepare for the next pandemic.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of KHN, Joanne Kenen of Politico and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet, and Anna Edney of Bloomberg News.

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

Also this week, Rovner interviews Diana Greene Foster of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco. She is the lead researcher of the “Turnaway Study,” which followed a thousand women who sought abortions for several years afterward to see how their lives turned out.

Plus, for extra credit, the panelists recommend their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: KHN’s “After Miscarriages, Workers Have Few Guarantees for Time Off or Job-Based Help,” by Bryce Covert

Anna Edney: The AP’s “How a Kennedy Built an Anti-Vaccine Juggernaut amid COVID-19,” by Michelle R. Smith

Joanne Kenen: HuffPost’s “The Right’s War on Government Is Working and It Could Cost Lives,” by Jonathan Cohn

Sarah Karlin-Smith: The Column’s “Covid Isn’t a Human Being, It Doesn’t Care What You Think About It,” by Adam Johnson


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