ACA premium prices insuring 900K Georgians to shoot up – again

The Affordable Care Act health insurance program that covers 900,000 Georgians is on track to see price hikes of as much as 20% or more when open enrollment begins this fall for 2027 coverage. That’s according to state data obtained by the Georgia Recorder for the ACA exchange run by the state and called Georgia Access.

Next year’s inflation is on top of massive price increases that already occurred for 2026 coverage after Congress and President Donald Trump allowed pandemic-era extra ACA subsidies to expire. 

The insurance companies’ proposed price increases on the Georgia marketplace are not final. First, the numbers might still change because they are from the mid-summer negotiation point, said Bryce Rawson, a spokesman for the Georgia Office of the Commissioner of Insurance. Prices are finalized before open enrollment begins Nov. 1. 

In addition, the premium price changes that consumers see when they go to sign up at open enrollment will also be affected by how federal and state subsidies are calculated.

But the news is a signal and a blow to customers, as well as to the hospitals who wonder if this means more are going to walk in uninsured next year in need of free care. A lobbyist for hospitals in Georgia, Monty Veazey, said that the massive price increase that already took effect this year threw so many people off the ACA exchange that Georgia hospitals lost $441 million, based on his calculations of the average value per insured person. 

Carry Smith, an ACA customer in coastal Georgia, was terse when told about the coming price increases. Smith juggles multiple part-time jobs and has depended on her ACA plan to keep a life-threatening infection at bay. 

Smith’s premium insurance skyrocketed seven-fold earlier this year, and she managed because she had just paid off her car. She couldn’t say exactly how she plans to pay her premium if it increases yet again. Hearing the possible numbers, Smith said, simply, “Wow.”

Nora Pullen, a self-employed life and wellness coach and math and testing tutor in Fayette County, already dropped her ACA coverage this year after prices skyrocketed. She had little hope that prices would come back within reach this year but this seals it.

“I honestly don’t think this is sustainable for people,” Pullen said, when told about the planned increases.

Pullen is a Democratic activist but the decisions are being felt across the political spectrum. 

However, the decisions to drop coverage are weighted in one camp: those who are healthy, like Pullen. Those who are in immediate need of care, like Smith, are more likely to stay. And that becomes a corporate Catch-22 where it’s even more expensive for insurance companies to keep providing coverage, causing them to raise prices yet again.

“It is not a good indication of where the market’s going, to see two years of extremely steep increases like this,” said Cynthia Cox, senior vice president and director of the Program on the ACA at the health research nonprofit KFF. “What we’re seeing is that insurers are saying that they’re kind of expecting the market to continue shrinking. In other words, more people becoming uninsured, likely because it would be the healthier people who leave the market, and that’s what’s making premiums go up.”

After the last round of price increases, Georgia saw about 350,000 people drop their ACA insurance from spring of 2025 to spring of 2026, one of the largest drops in the nation. That’s partly because Georgia didn’t expand Medicaid to all its poor, so huge numbers of Georgians just above the poverty level are instead insured through Georgia Access.

Georgia Access enrollment now stands at about 900,000, according to the state.

Some advocates, like Veazey, also blame insurance companies for taking advantage of the moment to make even more profits. The one insurer in Georgia that has a lower price increase this year is Ambetter, part of Centene Corporation. They already did a price increase of 38% for Georgia ACA plans last time, so this year they’re only raising prices here by 10%. That’s still far ahead of most other inflation, but the company has touted such moves as part of its financial comeback this year, according to Forbes, leading to a $1 billion profit just in the last quarter. Centene did not respond to those criticisms Friday afternoon.

What all this means in the end is that more people will drop insurance, said Veazey, president of the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals. That means that more people will hold off on going to the doctor when they should, and they won’t seek care till they’re worse. And then when they do, it won’t be to the doctor; they’ll walk into his members’ emergency rooms, because that’s the one place where federal law mandates that people be stabilized no matter their ability to pay.

“It’s not good for us, nor is it good for the patient,” Veazey said.