In early September, UCare, one of the largest providers of privatized Medicare in Minnesota, announced that they would not offer Medicare Advantage health plans in 2026. This was no small move — it summed up to roughly 158,000 Minnesota seniors who, by December 7, 2025, will need to look elsewhere for health coverage.
“This decision was not made lightly,” UCare CEO Hilary Marden-Resnik said in a statement. It comes at a time when health insurance costs — for both providers and recipients — are ballooning. UCare isn’t alone, either: in July, UnitedHealthcare announced they will drop Medicare Advantage plans covering over 600,000 people nationwide amid their own financial troubles.
These price increases are due to all sorts of factors, depending on who you ask. The Economic Policy Innovation Center, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., cites rising “medical costs, labor shortages for skilled healthcare workers, high-cost specialty drugs, tariffs and economic uncertainty” and inflation as reasons for rising health care costs.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a think tank focused on health policy, came to a different conclusion. At the end of this year, enhanced premium tax credits passed under the Biden White House are set to expire. In a Sept. 30 analysis, the KFF estimated that “if Congress extends enhanced premium tax credits, subsidized enrollees would save $1,016 in premium payments over the year in 2026 on average. In other words, expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits is estimated to more than double what subsidized enrollees currently pay annually for premiums.”
Health care economics is a thorny issue, so it’s understandable to watch politicians and pundits pass responsibility around. But it’s worth getting out of abstractions and saying it straight: regardless of who or what is at fault here, in January, Minnesotans who rely upon the Affordable Care Act to keep them on health care will see their costs spike, and fiscal strain on hospitals across the state isn’t likely to go anywhere, either.
Things are likely to get tighter from there. Thanks to Medicare cuts in H.R. 1, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” state hospitals and nursing homes will lose approximately $500 million in federal funding each year for the next 10 years, and the KFF has estimated that 152,000 to 253,000 Minnesotans could lose health insurance coverage.
In a July interview with CNN, Dr. Tyler Winkelman, who works at Hennepin Healthcare, a major provider in Minneapolis, worried about how patients delaying visits to the doctor (due to a variety of factors, including price anxiety) might impact their pipeline.
“If my patients can’t come in to see me, they are going to wait until things get really bad,” he said. “And that means once things have hit that point, they will need to see my colleagues in the emergency department, and we really worry about the emergency department filling up.”
The looming health care crisis carries grim arithmetic: fewer beds, greater demand and increased prices for everyone involved. Health insurance is getting more expensive at every level — insurers, hospitals, nursing homes, taxpayers — but, at the end of the day, it’s patients who will be left hurting the most.
So: Now what? In a moment where national and local politics are increasingly intertwined, it’s tough to see an obvious way out of the woods, and the fight over the recent government shutdown, which was in large part over health care tax credits, is all but certain to return early next year, when the current federal budget will hit another snag.
Even if the federal government cannot come to a sustained agreement on what to do next, kicking this can even further down the road ignores the basic facts of the matter: Hospitals are struggling to manage costs, and many Minnesotans will likely lose access to health care in the coming months.
The best hope, then, may lie in the state government. Republicans and Democrats alike in the Minnesota House ought to work to patch the holes left by health care coverage cuts, protecting Minnesotan families from the worst effects of a debate happening on the other side of the country. Otherwise, just a few months from now, hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans will be left in the lurch.