As Americans enrolled in Obamacare begin to look up the price of their coverage for 2026, some enrollees like Beth Dryer in Norfolk, Virginia, are realizing they have no other option than to cancel it altogether.
Dryer is the executive director of 757 Creative ReUse Center, and in 2015 she was paying just shy of $80 for her premium. She hadn’t looked up her 2026 options until Thursday, and the spike was shocking.
“This says I now have an advanced premium tax credit of $0, so it looks like I have no tax credit for this so far for next year,” she began to read from the enrollment site. “Okay, so it looks like the same plan that I have this year would now be $425.03 a month next year, which is completely out of my budget.”
A premium four times as much as she’d been paying and more than she had anticipated.
Asked how that made her feel seeing such a spike, she said “not great” and added that she’s “absolutely” going to have to cancel her coverage, leaving her in a “really scary” situation.
A bank of storm clouds hovers over the dome of the U.S. Capitol, on the 30th day of the government shutdown, in Washington, October 30, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
“I can put money in a savings account and use that if I absolutely have to, but otherwise there’s no more routine care for me. There’s no mammography, there’s no annual visits, and I know that there are a lot of things that run in my family that you know could get me right about this age, all the women in my family have had breast cancer, so I know that’s on the table for me, but I feel pretty helpless at this moment,” she said.
-ABC News’ Justin Gomez