Jon Husted Healthcare Cost of Living

Ohio Just Lost More Obamacare Coverage Than Any State in America. Jon Husted Helped.

Ohio saw the biggest Affordable Care Act enrollment drop in the country — nearly a third of enrollees gone — after Jon Husted and Ohio's senators let health subsidies expire and voted for Trump's budget bill.

MAGA Report Cards · Jul 18, 2026

Ohio Just Lost More Obamacare Coverage Than Any State in America. Jon Husted Helped.

Of all 50 states, one lost more Affordable Care Act coverage than any other over the past year: Ohio. And one of the people who helped make it happen is Jon Husted.

New federal data, reported by the Ohio Capital Journal, shows Ohio's enrollment in ACA health plans fell from just under half a million people in February 2025 to about 336,000 a year later. That's a loss of 161,385 people — nearly a third of everyone who had that coverage. No state in the country was hit harder.

How it happened

This wasn't bad luck. It was a choice.

For years, extra pandemic-era subsidies made it cheaper to buy health insurance on the ACA marketplace. Last year, the Republican-controlled Congress let those subsidies expire. The result was immediate: premiums doubled for most of the 25.2 million Americans who buy their coverage there. When insurance suddenly costs twice as much, people drop it. Nationally, enrollment fell by 2.6 million — about 10%.

In Ohio, it was three times worse than the national average.

And letting those subsidies lapse came just months after Ohio's senators voted for President Trump's so-called "Big Beautiful Bill." Husted didn't just go along with it quietly — he publicly praised the budget bill's passage.

What that bill actually did

Here's what Husted was cheering. Trump's budget bill:

Locked in the 2017 tax cuts, handing an estimated $1 trillion windfall over 10 years to the richest 1% of Americans.
Cut roughly the same amount — about $1 trillion — from Medicaid and food assistance, the programs working families rely on.

So the math is simple and ugly: a trillion dollars up to the very top, a trillion dollars away from health care and food for everyone else. Ohio's record-breaking coverage collapse is what that trade-off looks like on the ground.

Dropping a marketplace plan doesn't always mean someone has no insurance — some find it elsewhere. But health experts warn many of these Ohioans are simply going to end up uninsured. As the health policy director at the Center for American Progress put it, "the direction is becoming increasingly clear" — the loss of the subsidies plus the bill's Medicaid cuts are "making health insurance harder to afford, leaving many families without a realistic alternative." Those same Medicaid cuts are already pushing insurers to pull out of states.

This is a pattern for Husted

Voting to make health care more expensive for Ohioans fits everything else we know about Jon Husted's short time in the Senate.

He works for big business, with top donors including American Electric Power, Cardinal Health, and Nationwide Insurance. He got caught taking down a social media post of himself laughing with lobbyists while bragging about Trump's bill. And when Ohioans have wanted to ask him about any of this, he's refused to hold a real town hall, sticking to telephone events with pre-screened questions.

The through-line is who he serves. Time and again, Husted has put Trump and billionaires over working Ohio families. The 161,385 Ohioans who just lost their health coverage are the ones paying for it.

The bottom line

Every state that let these subsidies expire hurt its own people. Ohio hurt them the most. And Jon Husted — who represents those Ohioans in the Senate — voted for the bill that made it possible and then applauded when it passed.

When the next round of premium hikes hits and even more families get priced out, remember: this was a decision, and Husted was on the wrong side of it.