ACA Signups: 2025 Year in Review (Jan - Jun)

Everyone else is doing it so I guess I should join the crowd...
Tue, 12/30/2025 - 2:48pm

I originally launched ACASignups.net in the fall of 2013 during the first batcrap insane ACA Open Enrollment Period. That means it’s been around for over 12 years now.

Every week I send out a weekly digest, which pretty much just includes a roundup of links to everything I had published the previous week, regardless of how major or minor it was.

However, I’ve never published an annual roundup of the most significant things I wrote over the course of the year…until today.

I also wanted to thank all of my supporters, whether you’ve been following my work for years or just started to do so recently; it means a lot to me.

Speaking of which, if you find my work useful & would like to support it, you can do so in two ways:

With that said, here's January - June 2025 (I'll post July - December tomorrow):

Believe it or not, my very first post of 2025 was about an important positive development in U.S. healthcare policy: Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (passed & signed into law by Democrats & President Biden), Medicare Part D enrollees started having their prescription drug costs capped at no more than $2,000 per year.

This was the first incarnation of what would eventually become an analysis of the impact on expiring enhanced tax credits for typical households in all 50 states.

This is probably the most important collection of blog posts/analysis I published all year, for whatever that’s worth.

The NBPP is an annual collection of regulatory modifications to how the Affordable Care Act is implemented. These were the final changes made by the Biden Administration before the Trump Regime took over (and almost immediately began rescinding Biden-era changes).

The day before the Trump Regime took control of the entire federal government, I posted an explicit warning about the veracity of data published by it going forward.

Interestingly, in spite of them either fudging, manipulating or simply deleting terrabytes of other vital healthcare data going forward, they don’t seem to have messed with the actual enrollment data for programs like ACA exchange policies, Medicare, Medicaid & the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) as of yet; the reports have continued to be published on a mostly regular basis, and the underlying data seems to be on the up & up…so far.

I eventually compiled links to the archived versions of the entire pre-Trump CDC website, which is still available here.

I also eventually compiled similar archives for FDA.gov, CMS.gov and NIH.gov.

This project—one of several graphics-intensive ones I worked on this year—pretty much overwhelmed me for most of February and March. I revised & updated the various states over the next few months as well.

This was the infamous so-called “Integrity & Affordability Rule” which included none of either. About half the provisions were thankfully later stopped (at least temporarily) by a federal judge, but the other half have all gone through (or are about to).

This rule is also the reason why average ACA premiums will be 115% higher starting January 1st instead of “only” 85% higher…and why the maximum out of pocket cap for enrollees will be $450 higher apiece than it otherwise would have been.

The moment I read that the Trump Regime was planning on defending the ACA against this lawsuit, red flags started to go off in my head…and sadly, I was proven correct a few months later.

This was the main reason for my “pie chart” project earlier in the year: I knew that the draconian attacks on the ACA and Medicaid were coming soon.

As I said earlier, for whatever reason, the Trump CMS seems to be playing the actual enrollment data straight so far. This is a detailed analysis of the breakout of 2025 ACA enrollment (use the drop-down menu).

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