Making health care tax credits permanent is Shaheen's first 2025 bill

Trying to prevent an 18% increase in Granite Staters going without health insurance is the objective of the first bill U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said she will propose this year, which would make related tax credits permanent.

These tax credits are available to families who are enrolled in the Health Insurance Marketplace that comes under the Affordable Care Act.

Shaheen led the effort to expand the application of these credits, which were included in the American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed in January 2021 to deal with the economic fallout from COVID-19.

Congress then agreed to further extend these credits with the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022.

The credits are offered on a sliding scale for families that make between 100% of the federal poverty level ($31,200 for a family of four) and 400% of the federal poverty level ($124,800 for a family of four).

Shaheen also got Congress to make a change to avoid a “cliff” that denied any credit for families making just over 400% of the federal poverty level.

These tax credits will go away at the end of 2025 unless Congress agrees to extend them.

“Let’s be very clear: if Congress fails to act before these tax credits expire, tens of millions of Americans will see a substantial increase in costs and thousands of Granite Staters could lose their health insurance entirely,” Shaheen said in a statement.

“I’m urging my Republican colleagues to work with us on the upcoming tax package so we can permanently extend these highly effective tax credits and keep costs from skyrocketing for millions of Americans.”

According to Shaheen’s staff, 65% of self-employed owners or employees of small businesses, numbering nearly 90,000 in the state, take advantage of these premium tax credits.

Shaheen said it’s critical for Congress to act on this as early in 2025 as possible because insurers must file their plans and rates with state regulators during the first half of the year.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if these credits aren’t extended, premiums will go up by about 7.9% and 3.8 million Americans could lose insurance coverage.

The sudden premium increases from the loss of these credits would affect 20 million in the U.S., Shaheen said.

A U.S. Treasury report in 2022 found 1.5 million children, including 5,000 from New Hampshire, receive coverage through the Marketplace.

The legislation is a priority of the U.S. Senate Democratic caucus, with 41 of them signing a letter with Shaheen in support of the measure.

Last week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, became the first GOP senator to confirm she supported the concept of the legislation as it would help many lower-income citizens in her state.

Since Shaheen is in the minority in the new Senate, she’ll have to rely upon the backing of Senate GOP leaders.

Shaheen aides acknowledge that one way to achieve this may be to make it part of an omnibus package that GOP congressional leaders want to make some of the Trump tax cuts permanent since they too would expire without action at year’s end.

A diverse coalition of groups have backed the bill in the past from the Center for American Progress and the AIDS Institute to the American Lung Association, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, National Alliance on Mental Illness and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).