Troy Downing Healthcare Lies Montana

Troy Downing Says the Health Insurance Tax Credits He Voted Against Extending Were for 'a Small Set' of the Market. More Than 58,000 Montanans Were Getting Them.

In a new op-ed, Downing says the expired ACA tax credits were a COVID-era fix for a sliver of the market. Congress extended them in 2022, most Montanans buying coverage on the exchange got them, and 11% of Montana's paying enrollees are already gone. He voted no on extending them — twice.

MAGA Report Cards · Sep 15, 2026

Troy Downing Says the Health Insurance Tax Credits He Voted Against Extending Were for 'a Small Set' of the Market. More Than 58,000 Montanans Were Getting Them.

For five years, Montanans who buy their own health insurance got extra federal tax credits that cut their monthly bills. Those credits ran out at the end of 2025, after Congress declined to extend them.

Troy Downing wants you to know that wasn't why your bill went up. In an op-ed in the Washington Reporter, which his office reposted on September 14, 2026, he wrote:

"You have probably heard some say that insurance premiums in Montana increased due to Congress not extending the enhanced premium tax credits and allowing them to expire. Those credits were a temporary fix passed during the COVID pandemic, aimed at a small set of the individual market and never meant to last beyond the COVID crisis. These insurance company credits expired, as designed."

And then:

"We cannot subsidize ourselves out of this underlying problem."

Most of that falls apart against the record — including Downing's own record as Montana's insurance commissioner.

"Never meant to last beyond the COVID crisis"

The extra credits did start during the pandemic, in the American Rescue Plan in 2021. But Congress didn't leave them there. In 2022 it passed them again. KFF, the nonpartisan health research group, says the enhanced credits were "introduced in 2021 and later extended through the end of 2025 by the Inflation Reduction Act." That second law had nothing to do with COVID. Congress chose to keep the credits going for three more years.

They "expired, as designed" only in the sense that every temporary law has an end date. Whether to extend them was a choice that came up for a vote. Downing voted on that choice. More on that below.

"Insurance company credits"

Downing calls them "insurance company credits." In March 2021, when he was Montana's insurance commissioner, he described them very differently.

After the American Rescue Plan passed, Downing urged Montanans on the health insurance exchange to update their applications so they would get "a reduction of their monthly payment." He said:

"The ARP also eliminates the income cap, which will give subsidies to many more Montanans. The special open enrollment period for healthcare.gov remains open until May 15, 2021, which allows anyone who can now afford coverage as a result of lower premiums to sign up for coverage or change plans."

In 2021, Commissioner Downing said the credits lowered what Montanans paid, reached "many more Montanans," and let people afford coverage who couldn't before. In 2026, Congressman Downing says they were for insurance companies and a small slice of the market.

"A small set of the individual market"

The individual market is where people buy their own insurance when they don't get it from a job, Medicare or Medicaid. Here's what happened on Montana's ACA exchange after the extra credits arrived:

In 2020, before the enhanced credits, 42,822 Montanans signed up for exchange coverage.
In 2025, 77,221 did.
In 2024, more than 58,000 Montanans received more than $63.5 million in the expanded credits, according to the same Daily Montanan report.
For 2025, about 77,000 Montanans bought exchange coverage and about 67,000 of them got tax credits, NBC Montana reported, citing KFF.

That is not "a small set." It is the large majority of the Montanans buying coverage on the exchange.

What happened when the credits expired

Downing's op-ed says extending the credits "would have moved the Montana premiums by only single digits."

Start with the part that's closest to true. The credits don't set the sticker price of a plan; insurers do. Nationally, the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker found the expiration pushed sticker prices "an average of 4 percentage points higher than they otherwise would have been" in 2026.

But most people on the exchange don't pay the sticker price. For them, the tax credit decides what a family actually pays each month, and that is the number Congress controlled. When the extra credits went away:

In the same analysis quoted above, KFF had estimated that what subsidized enrollees pay would rise 114% on average if they kept the same plans. Many switched to cheaper plans or dropped coverage instead; the actual average increase in what enrollees paid after subsidies was 58%, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
Middle-income people making just over 400% of the poverty line — $62,600 for a single person — lost their credits entirely. KFF estimated that a 60-year-old Montanan at that income would see what they pay for a benchmark silver plan rise 231%, to a full price of $1,469 a month — 28% of their income.

Then Montanans started leaving. Sign-ups for 2026 fell from 77,221 to 73,255. The drop in people who actually paid their bills and stayed covered was bigger. KFF's count of paying enrollees in Montana fell from 72,195 to 63,975 — down 11% in one year. That's 8,220 fewer Montanans with exchange coverage.

It happened nearly everywhere. Paying enrollment fell 12% nationwide, a loss of 2.6 million people, and dropped in every state except New Mexico, which used its own money to replace the lost credits.

The "older problem" he blames is the one the expiration made worse

Downing says the real cause of rising premiums is "adverse selection." That's when healthy people drop their coverage because it isn't worth the price, and the people left behind are sicker and more expensive to cover.

He's right that it drives premiums up. What he leaves out is what caused the latest round. The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker put it plainly:

"As anticipated, many healthier enrollees left the ACA Marketplaces in 2026 as their subsidies decreased – leading to an average increase in premium payments after subsidies of 58% this year – leaving behind an enrollee base that is on average somewhat sicker and more expensive to cover."

KFF found the same warning in the insurers' own paperwork: rate filings reported that the expiration would cause younger adults, who are typically healthier, to leave the exchange.

Montanans on the exchange could face another steep rate hike in 2027. Explaining why premiums keep climbing, Louise Norris, a health policy analyst for HealthInsurance.org, told Yellowstone Public Radio that "the healthiest people have been dropping their coverage, leaving a sicker risk pool."

Downing writes that "young, healthy Montanans increasingly do not see value in the coverage they are being asked to buy at the prices available." For Montanans who got tax credits, the price they actually paid went up because the credits expired. Letting them expire didn't sidestep adverse selection. It made it worse.

This isn't the first time he's argued this. Days after the credits lapsed in January, NBC Montana reported that Downing had posted on X that "the more money you put into a system, the more expensive things get in that system. The same applies to Obamacare subsidies."

How he voted

Downing cast three votes on health care as the credits were running out.

December 17, 2025: He voted yes on H.R. 6703, the House Republicans' "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." It did not extend the enhanced tax credits, which were due to expire two weeks later. We covered that vote and every Republican who cast it.
January 7, 2026: A petition led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries forced the House to take up a bill extending the credits. Downing voted no on the motion to bring it to the floor. It passed anyway.
January 8, 2026: The House passed a three-year extension of the credits, 230 to 196, with 17 Republicans joining all Democrats. Downing voted no.

He also voted for Trump's budget bill. The Joint Economic Committee projects 15,801 people in his own district will lose Medicaid coverage by 2034.

What he wants instead

Downing's op-ed offers bigger health savings accounts, more short-term and catastrophic plans, and a separate program for the most expensive patients. None of those puts a dollar back into the monthly bills of the Montanans who lost their credits in January. The one bill that would have done that passed the House, and he voted against it.

What the record shows

Troy Downing voted twice in January 2026 against extending the tax credits that helped more than 58,000 Montanans pay for health insurance. Now he says they were a COVID-era fix "aimed at a small set of the individual market," even though Congress extended them in 2022 and about 67,000 of the 77,000 Montanans on the exchange got tax credits. After the credits expired, the number of Montanans paying for exchange coverage fell 11%, from 72,195 to 63,975. The healthy-people-leaving problem he now blames is the one analysts say the expiration made worse.