Last week we learned that if Democrats retake Congress this November, they plan to move fast to address skyrocketing healthcare costs.

This plan appears to center on three priorities: undoing punishing Medicaid cuts passed as part of the Orwellian-named One Big Beautiful Bill, bringing back Affordable Care Act subsidies, and considering moving up the Medicare age of eligibility. For Ohioans, this isn’t an abstract debate. At issue is whether a person in their early 60s can quit a job they hate, retire when they planned to, or – and most importantly – survive being laid off without draining their savings.

Let’s review some of the carnage created by Congressional Republicans’ healthcare rampage – all carried out with President Donald Trump’s enthusiastic approval.

After Congress allowed the ACA premium tax credits to lapse at the close of 2025, Ohio’s ACA insurance marketplace sign-ups cratered. Without the stabilizing force of those credits, 161,000 fewer Ohioans were enrolled in marketplace plans in February 2026 than just a year earlier. Meanwhile, the typical Silver-tier plan skyrocketed about 20% to $625 a month for 2026, up from $497 in 2025. Those in households earning more than 400% of the federal poverty level lost access to subsidies altogether.

The demographic old enough to bear the brunt of premiums that climb with age, yet just shy of being eligible for Medicare at 65, is precisely the group who would gain the most from expanding Medicare eligibility. While the history of attempts to shore up healthcare access has been one of closing gaps and responding to changes in economic and social factors, this group has often been left behind.

Employment data adds another layer. Across the U.S., people between ages 60 and 65 are unemployed at rates similar to the general workforce (3.2% in March 2026, with a peak near 4.1 percent in January). But that number conceals a starker truth: once an older worker is out of a job, getting back to work takes them much longer than it does younger people.

By July 2026, laid-off workers between 55 and 64 were spending roughly 33 weeks unemployed on average, and those older than 65 were spending about 36 weeks out of work. Those in their late 40s and early 50s, in comparison, were unemployed an average of 20 weeks. The delta between these two groups will only widen as artificial intelligence renders entire sectors of our previous economic life obsolete.

In making healthcare access harder, Republican policymakers are actively promoting what economists call “job lock.” Many Ohioans in their early 60s stick with jobs they’d rather leave because employer-provided insurance is all that separates them from marketplace premiums they can’t afford. If they do end up out of work, they’re stuck job-hunting longer, without any affordable coverage bridging the gap.

This is where restoring Medicaid funding converges with the Medicare conversation. As the Capital Journal has previously reported, 600,000 Ohio residents had already lost Medicaid coverage between 2023 and 2025. As the Capital Journal explained, separate analysis from highly respected outlets showed that, without ACA subsidies, about 4.8 million Americans nationwide will end up with no coverage at all. A large share of these are working adults stuck in healthcare purgatory, earning too much for Medicaid and too little to cover a marketplace plan at full price. This gap only grows when insurers charge more depending on age, which they inevitably will if Congress doesn’t act.

Lowering Medicare’s eligibility age isn’t a simple fix, of course. For starters, it’s far from clear that lawmakers will be willing to expend the political capital required to fund it. There’s room for disagreement over its actual cost, its ripple effects on private insurance markets, and whether a more targeted approach (reinstating subsidies, for example) might deliver similar benefits at a better price point. Especially with Ohio’s rapidly aging population, Ohio’s congressional delegation owes its constituents an open debate on these questions. Voters should be asking candidates to state their positions.

The challenges Ohioans are facing should drive this policy debate. This isn’t a proposal built for the young and healthy. Instead, it’s targeted at exactly the stage of life when insurance grows both costlier and harder to replace. But it is precisely this stage of life when losing it can be the difference between retiring comfortably, retiring in financial ruin, or not retiring at all.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.