How expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies could affect health insurance costs in Massachusetts

🌂Warmer day, rainy evening, with highs in the 50s. Sunset is at 4:11 p.m.

An update on the Massachusetts family fighting a deportation order handwritten on sticky notes: immigration agents detained Juan David Quichimbo yesterday during a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He and his family have applied for a visa for survivors of labor trafficking. Under federal law, they are allowed to remain in the U.S. legally while they await a decision from an immigration judge.

The family’s immigration lawyer, Elizabeth Shaw, said she was with Quichimbo when agents took him into custody. He knew there was a good chance he’d be detained after agents moved his weekly check-in from Framingham to their office in Burlington.

“This is hard…so hard,” his wife, Mirian Ximena Abarca Tixe, told GBH’s Sarah Betancourt in a phone call yesterday. She was worried about how their 7-year-old daughter would handle the news. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell her, because later, she’s coming home from school.” You can read more about the family’s case here. 

Four Things to Know

1. A federal judge has ruled that Rümeysa Öztürk — the Tufts graduate student detained by federal agents earlier this year after co-authoring an op-ed urging the university not to fund companies linked to Israel’s war in Gaza — can once again do paid work as part of her studies. 

Öztürk had been unable to work since her release in May because federal officials terminated her record in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, a database ICE uses to track international students. “Here in the U.S., it is truly sad how much valuable knowledge is currently being lost due to the widespread fear of punishment within the academic community,“ she said in a statement after the decision.

2. Seven of the nine people detained by federal immigration officers at Allston Car Wash last month have been released. They said they worried about their families and their futures while in detention.

Clarisa Aguilon said her biggest concern was for her daughter. “I would pick her up every day from school and I also drop her off in the mornings — and that day, I couldn’t go pick her up,” Aguilon said, crying. “The worst experience for me was thinking about leaving my daughter here in this country.” Her sister, Heidy Aguilon Mauricio, said immigration agents “chained us like criminals.” “It was very hard for us because we didn’t commit any crimes,” she said. You can read more of their stories here. 

3. With the clock ticking before Boston residents receive their 2026 property tax bills in early January, state lawmakers are weighing a proposal from Mayor Michelle Wu to tax commercial properties at a slightly higher rate to lower the amount residents have to pay. State Senator William Brownsberger, who lives in Belmont and represents parts of Boston, criticized the idea, saying it would be “opening the door to burdening businesses all across the state.” 

“I don’t think it’s good for the downtown area of Boston to say, ‘Okay, your property values are going down, and because they’re going down, we’re going to increase your tax rate.’ That doesn’t make sense to me, doesn’t strike me as good policy on a statewide basis,” Brownsberger said.

4. Wellesley student Zoe Terry has been running Zoe’s Doll’s — an organization that gives Black and brown dolls to children free of charge — since she was 5 years old and living in Miami. In the 14 years since, she has given out 60,000 dolls to kids all over the world. 

“My mom used to work at a women’s shelter in Miami, so every year I would give away one of my brand new Christmas toys around Christmas time to a kid in the women’s shelter who may not have gotten a Christmas gift,” Terry said. “That’s a beautiful thing to be able to empower the Black image and for people to see Black dolls as beautiful.”

Expiring subsidies could increase health premiums for 400,000 Massachusetts residents

The 400,000 Massachusetts residents who get their health insurance through the Massachusetts Health Connector, our state’s Affordable Care Act marketplace, are on the precipice of a big change. With Congress voting earlier this year not to fund the subsidies that made their plans less expensive, they could see enormous increases in their health insurance costs.

“So they’re going to now just have to pay the market rate for that insurance,” Alex Sheff of the group Health Care For All told GBH’s Craig LeMoult. “We’re hearing from folks that are going to see their premiums double, even triple, for the same level of coverage.”

The conversation about whether Congress should restore those subsidies has been going on for months. It was a pivotal issue in the federal government shutdown in October and November. In the end, Republicans and a handful of Democrats voted to reopen the government without restoring the funds, but with a promise of a vote on the issue. That bill, a three-year extension of existing tax credits, is scheduled for a Senate vote on Thursday. 

“For the people we serve who depend on enhanced premium tax credits, this issue is not a remote political debate. It is a gut punch to those trying to make ends meet and trying to maintain their health and their financial security,” Audrey Morse Gasteier, executive director of the Massachusetts Health Connector, told LeMoult. “We do not have to go backwards like this.”

The vote is coming in the middle of the marketplace’s open enrollment, which goes until Dec. 23. Morse Gasteier told the State House News Service that they’ve seen more than 10,000 people terminate their coverage for 2026, double the number who had terminated by this time last year, and that she’s concerned that it’s because they can’t afford higher premiums.

“While we do everything we can to give Massachusetts residents clear information about changes resulting from federal policy and options to stay covered, we continue to implore policymakers in Washington to do the right thing and extend the enhanced premium tax credits,” Morse Gasteier told LeMoult.

Read LeMoult’s full story here. 

Dig deeper: 

–The trending ‘miracle fix’ for anxiety: Why beta blockers are suddenly everywhere

–Health care premiums could skyrocket come January for Mass. residents