ACA premiums will likely take their biggest jump in a while

No surprise here.

Next year, Americans who buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges are set to pay significantly more for coverage—and experts say policies advanced by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are at least partially to blame.

An analysis released Friday by the health policy research organization KFF and the Peterson Center on Healthcare found that across a sample of more than 105 ACA marketplace insurers in 19 states and the District of Columbia, companies are set to increase premiums by a median of 15%.

The analysis noted that insurers have cited a number of factors to justify pushing up premiums, including Trump's tariffs—which could drive up drug, equipment, and supply costs—and the expectation that the Republican-controlled Congress will not extend ACA tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year. - Common Dreams

Establishment Democrats and "distraction" claims

This blockquote is from a very righteous screed well worth reading in full.

All of that said, there's some idiot camped out near the very center of Democratic strategy circles who has convinced the party that American voters are stupid, the Democratic base is malevolent, and that the party can and should brush off the vast sweep of authoritarian cruelties being inflicted on the country to focus instead on the real issue, which is whatever one thing the strategists have finally cobbled together talking points for. Everything else? Deploying the military to American cities to allegedly "liberate" them from the political opposition? Countless illegal impoundments of congressionally mandated funds? Mass deportations, and extralegal renditions to foreign prisons? White House corruption so vast that it now accounts for the majority of Trump's wealth?

All of that is a distraction, goes the party-issued talking points. Everything is a distraction from everything else, and you're the fool for spreading your alarm around. Like a sucker…

Calling up the United States military against American citizens is not a distraction. The nullification of congressional budgeting powers is not a distraction. A president selling a memecoin transparently designed to be a vehicle for bribery is not a distraction. An orchestrated strategy of seizing immigrants who dare show up for their own immigration hearings is not a distraction. Whirling tariff policies that seem to have little purpose other than one man's self-aggrandizement are not a distraction. None of it is a distraction, not rampant D.O.G.E. lawbreaking or defiance of court orders or the pardoning and elevation of violent seditionists or the installation of a page-long list of transparently incompetent cranks and corruption-enablers as top government officials. - Uncharted Blue

Abortion bans and restrictions are costing $133B/yr and counting

Obviously some will quibble about the precise figures and about how much can really be attributed to the effects of Dobbs. But that there is a big economic cost is beyond any legitimate dispute.

A new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a DC-based think tank, estimates that the 16 states with total or near-total abortion bans have sustained more than $64 billion in economic losses annually since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022. That’s enough to cover the average estimated health care costs related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period for nearly all of the 3.6 million births that occurred in the US last year, the IWPR fact sheet says.

Nationwide, the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe has led to a staggering $133 billion in economic losses each year, IWPR estimates. Beyond the 16 state bans, the loss of federal protections that Roe offered, plus restrictions in other states that reduce abortion access—such as mandatory pre-abortion counseling and waiting periods, restrictions on providers, and gestational limits—have had an enormous economic toll, the think tank says. The restrictions keep more than a half million women out of the labor force each year, with Black women and Latinas suffering the greatest impacts, according to IWPR’s analysis.

This is not the first indication that Dobbs has shrunken the workforce and stunted the economy. Recent research from both IWPR and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), for example, shows that young, highly educated people are moving out of states with abortion bans. And another recent NBER paper found that abortion restrictions increased rates of intimate partner violence by 7 to 10 percent, contributing to a projected increase of $1.24 billion in social costs, including health care and lost productivity for victims. But the new IWPR fact sheet provides some of the timeliest analysis of the economic impacts of Dobbs, and helps quantify the overall costs of rising abortion restrictions nationwide. “This is not just a women’s crisis, it’s really a national economic crisis of significant magnitude,” says Melissa Mahoney, senior research economist at IWPR and lead author of the report. - Mother Jones

What Trump is doing, or is trying to do, to colleges and universities

This is a good overview. My own take is that since Trump himself is incapable of independent thought and action, what “policies” go out in his name depend on who has his ear at any given time.

The first six months of the Trump administration have brought a hailstorm of changes to the nation’s colleges and universities. While the president’s faceoffs with Harvard and Columbia have generated the most attention, students on campuses throughout the country are noticing the effects of the administration’s cuts to scientific and medical research, clampdown on any efforts promoting diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), newly aggressive policies for students with loan debt, revoking of visas for international students and more.

Many of the administration’s actions are being challenged in court, but they are influencing the way students interact with each other, what support they can get from their institutions — and even whether they feel safe in this nation. - Hechinger Report

Research cuts would hurt everyone, sooner or later

Even those who support such cuts, largely due to their own fear of real intelligence and scientific knowledge, will pay a price.

Large cuts to government-funded research and development can endanger American innovation – and the vital productivity gains it supports.

The Trump administration has already canceled at least US$1.8 billion in research grants previously awarded by the National Institutes of Health, which supports biomedical and health research. Its preliminary budget request for the 2026 fiscal year proposed slashing federal funding for scientific and health research, cutting the NIH budget by another $18 billion – nearly a 40% reduction. The National Science Foundation, which funds much of the basic scientific research conducted at universities, would see its budget slashed by $5 billion – cutting it by more than half.

Research and development spending might strike you as an unnecessary expense for the government. Perhaps you see it as something universities or private companies should instead be paying for themselves. But as research I’ve conducted shows, if the government were to abandon its long-standing practice of investing in R&D, it would significantly slow the pace of U.S. innovation and economic growth. - The Conversation

Atmospheric CO2 just keeps on climbing

Another “milestone,” of a very problematic sort.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked above 430 parts per million in 2025—the highest it has been in millions of years—according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego on Thursday…

The last time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations topped 430 ppm was most likely more than 30 million years ago, Ralph Keeling, who directs the Scripps CO2 Program, told NBC News.

"It's changing so fast," he said. "If humans had evolved in such a high-CO2 world, there would probably be places where we wouldn't be living now. We probably could have adapted to such a world, but we built our society and a civilization around yesterday's climate." - Common Dreams

Trump tariffs worsen the "pink tax"

Certainly because of their general ideology this is about the last thing the pro-tariff crowd is likely to worry about.

The pink tax is the extra price women pay for products that are also marketed to men — think shampoo or clothing. Back in 2015, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that across five industries, women were paying more for everyday products than men:

- 7 percent more for toys and accessories

- 4 percent more for children’s clothing

- 8 percent more for adult clothing

- 13 percent more for personal care products

- 8 percent more for senior/home healthcare products

Although recent evidence suggests that the pink tax doesn’t apply to every product, it was already more expensive to import items for women than it was for men. Experts have dubbed this the “pink tariff.” As of 2022, US clothing tariff rates were more than three percentage points higher for women (16.7 percent) than they were for men (13.6 percent). When I heard the news that more tariffs were on their way, my immediate thought was the following: Being a woman in America is about to get a whole lot more expensive, especially because of the beauty industry. - Public Notice