About 20 people gathered Monday at noon outside the downtown Davenport building housing offices of U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa 1st District), to protest the 2025 expiration of federal tax credits to help people enroll in Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance plans.
On the 16th anniversary of the ACA (March 23), health care advocates, patients, and community leaders held six events across Illinois (including Davenport) to celebrate the law’s impact expanding access to healthcare and to warn about the consequences of recent federal policy decisions that threaten coverage and affordability.
“It helped drive the uninsured rates to historic lows,” said King Moosa, organizing manager for Citizen Action Illinois, one of the organizers of Monday’s rallies. “While we celebrate the progress, we also have to be clear-eyed about the fight ahead. Key affordability protections, including premium tax credits, are being rolled back. That means real consequences for real people.”
In Iowa alone, 100,000 people will lose coverage without the ACA tax credits, including 26,000 people in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District (represented by Miller-Meeks), he noted.
“Today is both a celebration, and a call for urgency. The ACA showed us what’s possible when we put people first. Now it’s up to us to protect our progress and keep pushing forward. We have to push for more affordable, more accessible and more equitable health care for everyone.”
Marketplace enrollment increased following the enactment of enhanced premium tax credits in 2021, as more individuals became eligible for subsidies. In 2025, individual market enrollment reached a record high of 25.2 million people, according to Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
Sue Dinsdale, executive director of Iowa Citizen Action Network, said Monday: “This past year, President Trump and nearly every Republican in Congress, including every single one of Iowa's delegations, voted to take health care away from 15 million people and raise health care costs while simultaneously extending more tax breaks for the wealthy.”
“If Congress can afford more tax breaks for the rich, they can certainly afford tax credits for families struggling with health care affordability,” she said, noting almost 70,000 people in this Congressional district rely on SNAP “to feed their families at a time when groceries are at an all-time high.”
“Between the president and the congressional attacks on health care and their gifts to their wealthy shareholders and healthcare corporations, and using language like reduce waste and fraud, reduce waste and abuse, and calling tax giveaways working-class tax breaks, it's just not right,” Dinsdale said. “So that's why we're here today, to hold Representative Miller-Meeks accountable for her votes against Iowans while stripping down the elements of the Affordable Care Act.”
At the event outside the US Bank building at 201 W. 2nd St., Davenport, Jay Williams of Bettendorf told how he and his wife are taking care of their 12-year-old grandson, Hayden, who was severely burned when he was six months old. He’s had 15 surgeries, skin grafts, muscle repair, dental reconstruction, ongoing therapy, medication, and more to come.
“Without public funding like Medicaid and the ACA, Hayden does not live with us. He goes into the system and maybe he doesn't make it,” Williams said. “That's not politics, that's not hyperbole, that's reality. So when we celebrate the ACA, understand that what we're celebrating, we're celebrating the decision that human beings are not a cost to be cut. They are lives to be held. Now let's talk about where we are.
"We're standing outside the office of Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks. And let's be clear, this matters because she has voted over and over again for welfare, for the rich, for the privileged, for the policies that increase the greatest upward redistribution of wealth in history.”
“We're not here arguing about numbers. We're here asserting a deeper trust that love is not just a feeling. Love is the substance,” he said. “And structure that organizes a society that works. If our systems keep people alive, keep families together, keep communities stable, that is love made public. If your system breaks families, denies cares and pushes people into suffering, that is not strength, that is failure. Now here's a silver bullet. The thing that we can't argue away. A society organized around love outperforms a society organized around extraction.
“Every time healthier people contribute, more stable families cost less to support,” Williams added. “Love is strong, love is efficient, love is sustainable. Love works. And that means this. The future belongs to a nation of people who take care of people. Not because it's nice, not because it's true, because it works better, because it wins.”
“When we celebrate the ACA today, we're not celebrating perfection, we're celebrating direction,” he said. “We're saying we choose to build a country where care is infrastructure, where dignity is baseline, where belonging is real. And to Representative Miller-Meeks, we say this clearly. We are watching, we are organizing, and we are not confused. You can stand with systems that extract from the vulnerable, or you can stand with the people who make this country live. You don't get to claim pro-family while dismantling the various structures that keep families together.
“That hypocrisy is over. We see it and reject it,” Williams said. “And we're building something better. Because Hayden belongs. Every child belongs, every family belongs, every person belongs. And any system that forgets that will be replaced by one that remembers. That's not ideology. That's reality steering itself forward.”
Human cost of cutting care
Dr. Judith Crosset, a retired psychiatrist, said: “When I hear we need to cut programs like Medicaid, Medicare, VA or the ACA, in the name of waste, fraud and abuse, my response is very simple – balderdash,” also adding a profanity to describe it.
“Of course there’s some waste in any large program, but the human cost of cutting care is far greater,” she said, noting the 16th anniversary of the ACA matters because that act proves that “we are capable of doing better,” Crosset said. “It’s not perfect; it’s not enough, but it shows we can expand coverage; we can lower barriers; we can choose health care as a right and a public good.”
“We must protect and strengthen Medicaid, Medicare and the ACA,” she added. “If we want a healthy, educated, thriving country, we have to choose policies that let people get the care that they need to live fully human lives.”
“The Affordable Care Act changed lives. It changed their health,” said Dr. Francis Kane. “The tax credits that help families afford marketplace coverage mean that patients can actually get the care they need. Doctor visits, medicine, hospital care, specialty treatment. Without those credits, I can tell you in my practice, hundreds of families would be back on that difficult curve of what am I going to be able to afford? I read something that now people who are declaring bankruptcy because of medical bills is at an all-time high.”
“We cannot go backwards. We will not go backwards,” Dr. Kane said. “Health care should not depend on your job title, your income, your zip code. We all deserve some basic tenets. And in fact, when you look at a country and how they spend medicine, how they spend money, we should be protecting the fragile, the elderly, the children. And instead, we've got an administration that wants to help with big corporations.”
Dr. Jake Thomas, a QC anesthesiologist who also has an MBA, said the ACA was not a perfect promise, but a noble beginning that “in the wealthiest nation in the history of civilization, we would not let our neighbors go bankrupt getting a cancer diagnosis. We would not let our children go without insulin because their parents couldn't make the premium. We would not force our veterans to choose between heart medications and heating bills,” he said.
Miller-Meeks, a physician who sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, “she didn't just fail to stop it, she actively opposed extending them,” Thomas said of ACA tax credits. In the aftermath of that expiration, Iowa insurance carriers have increased premiums between 12.5% and 25%.
“You want to talk about inflation? One of the line items on your budget just went up 12.5% to 25%,” he said. “Between the cost increase and the subsidy lost, the effective price is much, much higher.”
A household earning $95,000 a year will see an increase of $12,000 a year in premiums, Thomas said.
“And what does Mariannette Miller-Meeks have to say about all of this? She called the subsidies a bailout for insurance companies, the insurance companies that fund her campaign reelection,” he said. “She says Democrats put the expiration date in the law. Subsidies were not extended by a Republican Congress and a Republican executive. She says she's working on alternatives. She has a bill. She wants to call it the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act.
"It does not, in fact, extend the subsidies that are causing this increase in price for the tens of thousands of Iowans who are going to lose their care. Nor does it check the spiraling increase in premium costs going forward.”
“The people who currently hold power want you to believe healthcare is too complicated for anyone to assign responsibility. That is a lie they tell to avoid accountability,” Thomas said. “Here’s the truth, plain and simple. You should not go bankrupt getting sick in America. Your child should not go without care because of the zip code they're living in or what their parents do for work. Your parents should age with dignity, not spend their final years wondering which of their bills they're going to be able to pay.”
Of Miller-Meeks, he added: “This so-called doctor and the Iowa Republican Party own this failure and Iowa will not forget it.” In a recent KFF survey of about 1,100 people, nearly 10 percent reported they dropped health insurance altogether for 2026 because of premium increases.
The GOP alternative plan
In a statement Monday before the rally, Rep. Miller-Meeks said: “We need to lower healthcare costs for ALL Americans. That’s why I led and passed legislation in the House to expand access to affordable coverage and bring down premiums for millions of hardworking families. My bill delivers real relief by increasing competition and reducing out-of-pocket costs. It passed the House and is now awaiting action in the Senate. It’s time to get it across the finish line and deliver the relief Americans deserve.”
Republicans, who have strongly opposed extending the subsidies, say their plan addresses root issues that are not addressed by the ACA — things that they say have allowed for “waste, fraud and abuse.”
“Extending tax credits doesn’t do anything to lower health care costs or lower health care premiums. It just hides the fact that premiums are going up, but it doesn’t actually work to lower premiums,” Miller-Meeks said during a December 2025 call with reporters. “We want to work to lower premiums, and that’s the genesis of this bill.”
The legislation she introduced that month, now headed to the Senate, includes provisions aimed at lowering costs through competition and transparency:
- Appropriations for Cost Sharing Reduction payments starting in 2027
- Reduced regulations on stop-loss coverage to lower costs for small businesses
- Expanded access to Association Health Plans that allow small businesses and self-employed workers to purchase insurance together
- Renamed and strengthened Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (now dubbed CHOICE arrangements) that allow employers to give employees money to purchase their own health plan
- Transparency requirements on pharmacy benefit managers to provide employers and insurers with detailed data on prescription drug pricing
Since its passage in 2010, the ACA has helped millions of Americans gain health coverage by ending discrimination for people with pre-existing conditions, expanding Medicaid, and providing premium tax credits to make marketplace coverage more affordable, according to organizers of Monday’s events.
Today, roughly 24 million Americans receive coverage through ACA marketplaces, including about 395,000 Illinois residents who benefit from enhanced premium tax credits.
However, Congress has declined to extend the enhanced premium tax credits that lowered costs for marketplace plans.
As a result, premiums are projected to rise sharply, with average monthly costs expected to increase from $888 to $1,904 nationally without the enhanced assistance. Experts estimate 4.8 million people nationwide could lose coverage due to higher costs.
The impact in Illinois could be severe. State-level analysis estimates 528,000 more Illinoisans could be uninsured by 2034 due to Medicaid cuts and the expiration of enhanced ACA tax credits. In the nearer term, 70,000–90,000 Illinois residents could lose coverage because marketplace premiums become unaffordable. Premiums in Illinois have already increased by an average of 28.8% statewide largely due to the expiration of enhanced tax credits.
These impacts are projected to be felt in every congressional district, including Republican-held districts where thousands could lose coverage.
Dr. Thomas said a major source of health cost savings can come by better controlling prescription drug costs – through pharmacy benefit managers, marketing by corporations, and excessive profit margins for shareholders. He said of $300 billion in UnitedHealthcare revenue from premiums last year, fully $100 billion went directly to shareholders.
This story was produced by WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. We rely on financial support from our listeners and readers to provide coverage of the issues that matter to the Quad Cities region and beyond. As someone who values the content created by WVIK's news department, please consider making a financial contribution to support our work.
