Introduction
In September 2025, the Kaiser Family Foundation projected that Affordable Care Act Marketplace premiums would more than double on average for roughly twenty-two million Americans receiving enhanced premium tax credits if those subsidies were allowed to expire at year’s end.[1] For those enrollees, that figure represented a direct cost imposed by legislative inaction, not by any underlying change in their health or financial circumstances. The enhanced subsidies, first enacted as a temporary measure in 2021 and extended once through the Inflation Reduction Act, have never been made permanent. They are political leverage, not permanent law.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a framework of premium tax credits designed to make health insurance accessible and affordable for low and middle-income Americans.[2] The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 significantly expanded that framework, extending subsidy eligibility to households above 400% of the federal poverty level and reducing premium contributions for everyone in the eligible pool.[3] Congress allowed those enhancements to expire at the end of 2025. The result was immediate premium increases, a failed Senate vote, and a House-passed three-year extension that the Senate declared dead on arrival.[4]
This paper argues that this cycle is structurally unsound and undermines democratic accountability. The temporary extension of enhanced premium tax credits (PTC) under the Affordable Care Act reflects politically renewable entitlements that sacrifice durability for short-term partisan electoral advantages. To protect the reliance interests of the millions of Americans enrolled in Marketplace coverage, Congress should convert the enhanced subsidies into a permanent entitlement insulated from partisan bargaining.
Section I provides an overview of how the ACA originally structured premium tax credits and health insurance markets. Section II traces the political evolution of enhanced subsidies from their creation through repeated temporary extensions. Section III analyzes the concrete costs of that temporary structure, including premium instability, administrative disruption, and disproportionate harm to communities of color. Section IV examines the academic literature on legislative entrenchment and why the enhanced subsidy structure falls short of the durability that programs like Social Security and Medicare have achieved. Section V proposes converting the enhanced subsidies into a permanent entitlement and responds to the democratic accountability objection.
I. The Framework of ACA Subsidies
The Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, was the most significant restructuring of the American health insurance market in decades.[5] It expanded insurance coverage by creating regulated Marketplaces where individuals and families could purchase standardized private plans, and it subsidized the cost of those plans for people who could not afford them on their own. The ACA also introduced consumer protections including guaranteed issue, community rating, and essential health benefit requirements, changes that collectively made it impossible for insurers to simply exclude sick or low-income people from the individual market.
The mechanism through which the ACA addressed affordability was the premium tax credit. As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) explains, the credit “is refundable, allowing individuals to claim the full credit amount when filing their income taxes even if they have little or no federal income tax liability” and “is also advanceable, so individuals may choose to receive advanced payments” paid directly to insurers on a monthly basis.[6] In practice, this meant that eligible enrollees never had to pay the full sticker price of a Marketplace plan. The credit was calculated on a sliding scale tied to income, with the largest subsidies going to the lowest earners and the subsidy phasing out as income rose toward 400% of the federal poverty level.
That 400% cap was the framework’s central structural flaw. Under the original statute, a household earning one dollar above the threshold received no subsidy at all, a cliff that had no policy justification and that cut off assistance arbitrarily.[7] When the COVID-19 pandemic caused mass unemployment and sudden income loss, millions of people turned to the Marketplace for coverage the original framework was never designed to provide at scale. The subsidy cliff meant that many of them could not get meaningful assistance. Congress responded with the American Rescue Plan, but only on a temporary basis.
II. Political Evolution of Enhanced Premium Tax Credits
A. The Creation of Enhanced Subsidies
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 fixed the two most significant problems in the original framework. It eliminated the 400% federal poverty level cap entirely and capped required premium contributions at 8.5% of household income regardless of earnings. It also increased subsidy generosity across all income levels, making coverage cheaper for people who were already eligible. The Congressional Research Service confirmed that the Act “expanded eligibility for and the amount of the PTC for tax years 2021 and 2022” and that “the enhanced PTC provision allowed more households to become eligible for the credit and provided larger subsidies to all eligible households, compared with ACA-only rules.”[8]
The coverage effects were substantial. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) documented that the enhancements cut out-of-pocket premiums by more than half on average for over twenty million marketplace enrollees, making health care more affordable and doubling overall enrollment.[9] A record 93% of marketplace enrollees received premium tax credits, with total enrollment climbing from 11.2 million in February 2021 to 23.4 million by February 2025.[10] The enhanced subsidies brought in millions of Americans who had previously been priced out of the Marketplace, making them the largest coverage expansion since the ACA’s original Medicaid provisions.
These enhancements were written as temporary provisions with a built-in expiration date. The CRS confirms that the sunset date was January 1, 2026, and that without an extension, “the maximum income limit of 400% of the FPL would be reinstated and the applicable percentages would revert to higher levels resulting in lower subsidy amounts.”[11] Congress made a deliberate choice to write the enhancements this way. The consequences of that choice have played out every year since.
B. Political Bargaining and Temporary Extensions
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 extended the enhanced subsidies through 2025, but the core problem remained: the subsidies still had an expiration date. As December 2025 approached, the Senate failed to advance either a Democratic extension bill or a Republican health savings account alternative, and the subsidies lapsed on January 1, 2026.[12] Millions of enrollees saw their premiums spike immediately at the start of the new plan year.
Republican opposition to extension centered heavily on fraud. Party leadership argued that the enhanced subsidies had enabled widespread broker fraud, with unscrupulous agents signing consumers up for plans without their knowledge to collect subsidy-linked commissions. Broker fraud in the Marketplace was a real enforcement problem, but using it as grounds to let the entire enhanced subsidy program expire conflated a specific regulatory failure with the program itself. The CBPP documented that the fraud claims deployed against extension were “wildly inflated” and that “targeted and direct solutions, not cutting coverage, are how to curtail bad actors and protect consumers.”[13] The fact that Republican leadership chose to deploy the fraud argument as an all-or-nothing rationale for letting coverage lapse, rather than pushing for targeted enforcement reform, illustrates exactly the kind of partisan conditioning that temporary benefit design makes possible. When subsidies are permanent, opponents have to vote to cut them. When subsidies expire by default, opponents only have to block a vote.
Seventeen House Republicans joined all Democrats on January 8, 2026, to pass a three-year extension by a vote of 230-196, using a discharge petition that bypassed Speaker Mike Johnson.[14] Most of the Republicans who voted for the extension represented competitive swing districts. Democrats framed the credits as central to addressing the broader affordability crisis, while Johnson argued the credits enabled fraud and said Republicans would produce a separate health care cost proposal.[15] When Johnson refused to allow a floor vote, four Republicans used the discharge petition to force one.[16] The petition succeeded because the electoral math made defiance too costly for members in close districts, not because of any agreement about the long-term policy merits of the subsidies. That is the pattern this paper identifies as the defining problem: coverage for twenty-two million Americans was preserved through a procedural workaround driven by midterm self-interest, not through a durable legislative commitment. Unlike Social Security or Medicare, where the default is continuation and any reduction requires a visible vote, the enhanced ACA subsidies require a visible vote just to keep going. That asymmetry means the political burden always falls on those who want to protect coverage, not on those who want to cut it.
III. The Costs of Temporary Benefits
A. Consumer Reliance and Economic Instability
The most direct cost of the temporary subsidy structure is the financial harm imposed on enrollees when Congress fails to act. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that expiration would produce “a 114% increase from an average of $888 in 2025 to $1,904 in 2026” in annual premium payments for subsidized enrollees.[17] For a 60-year-old couple earning roughly $85,000 annually, the increase would be over $22,600 per year, pushing their benchmark plan cost to approximately a quarter of their annual income rather than the 8.5% cap the enhanced credits had established.[18] These increases had nothing to do with rising medical costs or changes in enrollee health status; they were the automatic result of the benefit legal structure, which makes a premium spike the default outcome of inaction.
The CBPP documented through focus groups how these projected increases translated into real decisions. A 57-year-old customer service representative from Georgia said she did not know what she would do if her plan increased by $103 a month. A 35-year-old restaurant manager from North Carolina, facing a 185% premium increase, said he would consider dropping coverage altogether and avoiding medical attention unless it became an emergency. A 45-year-old IT consultant from Illinois with Type 1 diabetes said he would have to make sacrifices in other areas of his life to cover the increased cost. Each of these people made a coverage decision based on the availability of a subsidy that Congress chose to make temporary. The disruption they faced when it lapsed was a foreseeable consequence of that legislative choice.
Health insurance is not the only context where temporary legal frameworks generate reliance problems. Randy J. Kozel, writing about constitutional precedent, identifies a principle that translates directly here: considerations such as the disruptiveness of overruling a settled rule “are independent of constitutional method,” meaning the harm caused by disrupting established legal frameworks can be evaluated on its own terms without resolving any deeper theoretical dispute about whether the underlying rule was correctly decided.[19] Congress faces the same calculus when it considers allowing benefits to lapse that millions of enrollees have relied on in making real decisions about their coverage, employment, and finances. Whether the enhanced subsidies represent optimal policy is a separate question from whether people reasonably organized their lives around them. As Kozel explains, “[t]he determinants of precedential durability include the relevant costs of perpetuating” or abandoning an established rule, and those costs exist regardless of whether the rule itself was wise.[20] The Georgia customer service representative and the North Carolina restaurant manager did not need to understand ACA policy to rely on it. They needed to be able to count on it from year to year.
The market-level consequences of subsidy uncertainty reinforce this point. When insurers cannot predict whether enhanced subsidies will continue into the following plan year, they price that uncertainty into their premiums. The enrollees most likely to drop coverage when premiums rise are the healthiest ones, because they have the least immediate need for care. Their departure degrades the risk pool and drives premiums higher for the sicker enrollees who stay. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that gross benchmark premiums would increase by 4.3% in 2026, 7.7% in 2027, and an average of 7.9% for the 2026-2034 period as a direct consequence of enhanced subsidy expiration.[21] Subsidy uncertainty does not only push some enrollees out of coverage; it raises costs for everyone who stays, because the people most likely to leave are the healthiest ones.
B. Administrative and Institutional Instability
Temporary benefits impose administrative costs that compound with each expiration cycle. The CRS documented that expiration creates a two-tier system with different subsidy formulas for 2025 versus 2026, requiring insurers to recalculate premiums, resubmit filings, and update all consumer-facing materials, a process that cannot easily be reversed if Congress later acts retroactively.[22] The CBPP observed that each day without an extension pushes more people away from Marketplace coverage in ways that are hard to reverse: consumers who see unaffordable premiums during open enrollment simply decide not to enroll, and getting them back once premiums are corrected is not straightforward.[23]
Cass R. Sunstein’s work on administrative law explains why this structural failure was predictable. Sunstein argues that regulatory programs fail most often not because of bad actors but because of “the creation of poor incentives” and strategies that produce “unanticipated systemic consequences, that deal with the symptoms rather than the causes of social problems.”[24] The more fundamental problem, he argues, is that government often fails to ask the right question: “in many areas the question is not whether the level of government regulation is appropriate, but whether the government has chosen the suitable strategies to accomplish its goals.”[25] A subsidy that expires by default is a strategy that cannot accomplish its goal. Instead of asking whether coverage levels are adequate, Congress is forced to ask whether the political conditions for renewal exist. Instead of administrators planning for continuity, insurers plan for disruption. The ACA was designed to expand coverage. A temporary subsidy structure systematically undermines that goal by making coverage contraction the legal default.[26]
C. Equity Effects
These costs fall hardest on the communities least able to absorb them. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that the enhanced ACA premium tax credits “have led to the largest increase in health insurance coverage since the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and saved enrollees on average $705 annually in 2024,” but that “Black families, who face higher rates of poverty and uninsurance even under ‘normal’ circumstances, are positioned to be hit especially hard by the loss of the enhanced subsidies.”[27] EPI documented that allowing the credits to expire would produce more than 200 preventable deaths among Black Americans annually, $740 million in additional annual premium costs for Black families, and more than $1.9 billion in annual economic losses in major metropolitan areas with large Black populations.[28]
These disparities are rooted in structural gaps in the health insurance system that the enhanced subsidies had partially closed. As EPI explained, “Black families are more likely to live in states that did not accept the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and they are less likely to work for employers that provide insurance coverage,” meaning that “losing access to the enhanced tax credits will result in increased health costs, loss of coverage, diminished health, and excess deaths, concentrated amongst the most disadvantaged.”[29] The Medicaid expansion gap is particularly significant here. In the thirty-nine states that did expand Medicaid, low-income adults gained coverage through Medicaid rather than the Marketplace. In the states that refused expansion, the Marketplace and its subsidies are often the only available coverage option for low-income adults. When enhanced subsidies expire, those states do not have a backstop.
The CBPP further documented that “people of color made up 54 percent of marketplace enrollees in 2024, up from 46 percent in 2021,” a shift directly attributable to the enhanced subsidies’ removal of the income cap and reduction of premium costs.[30] That shift represents real coverage gains for communities that have historically faced the highest uninsurance rates. A temporary benefit structure means those gains are always provisional. The communities that benefited most from the enhanced subsidies are the ones most exposed when they lapse, because they are the least likely to have employer-sponsored insurance to fall back on and the most likely to be priced out by the premium increases that follow expiration.
IV. Durability and the Entrenchment of Social Welfare Programs
The contrast between the enhanced ACA subsidies and programs like Social Security and Medicare comes down to one thing: how each program was designed. Social Security and Medicare do not need to be renewed. They do not expire by default. Any member of Congress who wants to reduce them has to cast a vote that constituents can see, identify, and respond to at the ballot box. That design choice is the reason those programs have lasted. The enhanced ACA subsidies were designed the opposite way. Their continuation requires a visible vote, and their reduction requires only inaction.
Posner and Vermeule define legislative entrenchment as “the enactment of either statutes or internal legislative rules that are binding against subsequent legislative action in the same form.”[31] In Legislative Entrenchment: A Reappraisal, they argue that the conventional objection to legislative entrenchment has no foundation. The rule against binding future Congresses, they contend, “has no deep justification in constitutional text and structure, political norms of representation and deliberation, efficiency, or any other source.”[32] Entrenchment is not inherently anti-democratic. It is a design choice about which policy outcomes are stable enough to be protected from the ordinary turbulence of political bargaining.
The ACA is itself a permanent statute. Its Marketplace structure, its consumer protections, its Medicaid expansion provisions all remain in place unless Congress affirmatively repeals them. The income cap in the original subsidy formula was also permanent, which is why it took the American Rescue Plan to remove it. The question this paper raises is not whether Congress has the power to make the enhanced subsidies permanent, because it plainly does. The question is whether the temporary design serves any legitimate purpose, and the answer is no. Structuring the subsidies as expiring provisions does not make Congress more accountable. It makes beneficiaries more vulnerable.
Posner and Vermeule identify predictability as one of the primary affirmative justifications for durable legislative design, noting that stable institutions “make it easier for individuals to arrange their affairs.”[33] They draw on Madison’s warning that expiring statutes produce situations where “all the rights depending on positive laws . . . would become absolutely defunct, and the most violent struggles ensue between the parties interested in reviving, and those interested in reforming the antecedent state of property.”[34] The 2025 subsidy expiration played out exactly this way. Rather than debating whether coverage levels were appropriate, Congress spent the final months of 2025 haggling over broker fraud enforcement rules, abortion funding riders, and health savings account provisions. The debate was structured entirely by the expiration clock, not by any substantive policy question about whether twenty-two million people should have affordable health insurance. Posner and Vermeule also note that expiring statutes give future majorities “the opportunity to challenge earlier legislative agreements that would otherwise be off the table,” generating conflict that serves no rational policy purpose.[35] Congress can avoid that cycle by making the enhanced subsidies permanent, which would allow future legislators to “incorporate in law fine-grained judgments about the correct balance between flexibility and stability” rather than relitigating the existence of the benefit every few years.[36]
The legal scholarship that could explain why the expiration date is the actual problem, Posner and Vermeule’s work on entrenchment and Sunstein’s work on regulatory stability[37] have mostly been applied to other areas, like budget rules and environmental regulation. As far as I can tell, nobody has really put these two things together for the ACA subsidies specifically. That is what this paper tries to do: take the numbers everyone already agrees on and use them to make a legal argument about how the program should be built.
V. Proposal: Converting Enhanced ACA Subsidies into a Permanent Entitlement
A. The Case for Permanence
Congress should eliminate the sunset provisions in the enhanced premium tax credit structure and replace them with ongoing appropriations authority tied to the income eligibility thresholds and contribution percentage schedules established by the American Rescue Plan and extended by the Inflation Reduction Act. This requires no constitutional innovation. It is the same structural choice Congress made when it enacted Social Security and Medicare: a judgment that a benefit is valuable enough to protect from the cycle of expiration, threat, and partisan negotiation that has characterized the enhanced subsidies since 2021.
Three arguments support this conclusion. First, the reliance interests of over twenty-two million enrollees are real and substantial. KFF documented that these enrollees have built their coverage decisions, financial planning, and in some cases their employment arrangements around the expectation of continued subsidy availability.[38] A temporary benefit structure makes the legal default one of harm, not protection, and it does so predictably. Second, the administrative costs of the expiration cycle are cumulative. Each round of uncertainty forces insurers to build lapse risk into their premiums, degrades the risk pool as healthy enrollees drop coverage, and imposes transaction costs on agencies and state Marketplaces that have to recalibrate repeatedly.[39] Third, the equity harm of temporariness falls hardest on low-income workers, people of color, and people in states that refused Medicaid expansion, exactly the communities the enhanced subsidies were designed to reach.[40]
B. Design Considerations
Making the enhanced subsidies permanent does not mean freezing the current formula. Congress can always adjust benefit levels through ordinary majority legislation, just as it adjusts Social Security cost-of-living increases and Medicare reimbursement rates. What permanence eliminates is the default of lapse, the structural feature that turns legislative inaction into automatic premium increases for millions of enrollees. A permanent entitlement would maintain the 8.5% income cap for households above 400% of the federal poverty level and the zero-premium benchmark for households at or below 150% of the federal poverty level, with adjustments available through ordinary legislation but the underlying entitlement secured as a matter of permanent federal law.
Posner and Vermeule identify this kind of design as a legitimate and valuable legislative tool. They argue that entrenchment “enables a government to make a credible commitment” to those who rely on it, making it “easier and cheaper for the government to control its relations with other entities.”[41] A permanent subsidy entitlement produces exactly that credibility: insurers can price premiums based on stable enrollment projections, enrollees can make coverage decisions without annual uncertainty about whether the subsidy will exist next year, and state Marketplaces can plan operations without budgeting for disruption. Sunstein’s work on regulatory design reinforces this point: programs that force administrators to focus on procedural survival rather than substantive outcomes are structurally set up to fail. The temporary subsidy structure does exactly that, redirecting the energy of Congress, agencies, and insurers away from the question of whether coverage is adequate and toward the question of whether the political calendar allows renewal.[42]
C. The Democratic Accountability Argument
The most common objection to permanent entitlement design is that it reduces democratic accountability, that requiring periodic renewal forces Congress to affirmatively choose to continue a benefit and remain answerable to voters for that choice. This argument is unpersuasive. Accountability only works when voters can trace a policy outcome back to a specific decision by a specific representative. The 2025 subsidy lapse resulted from a Senate procedural failure, inter-party disputes over abortion funding riders and health savings account provisions, and a House Speaker’s refusal to schedule a floor vote. None of that gives voters anything to hold a representative accountable for. Instead, it is noise that obscures who made which choice and why.[43]
The fraud debate illustrates this problem concretely. Instead of a direct vote on whether twenty-two million people should have affordable health insurance, Congress spent the final weeks of 2025 arguing about broker enforcement rules that had nothing to do with the merits of the subsidy program. The CBPP documented that the fraud estimates deployed to justify letting coverage lapse were wildly inflated and that targeted enforcement was the appropriate response.[44] Because the subsidies expired by default, opponents of the program did not need to vote to cut coverage. They simply needed to prevent a vote from happening. That is evasion and the temporary structure of the benefit is what makes the evasion possible.
Permanent entitlements produce more accountability, not less. When a benefit is permanent, reducing it requires a visible vote that representatives have to defend to their constituents. As Posner and Vermeule’s analysis confirms, there is no constitutional or normative reason to privilege temporary benefit design over permanent design.[45] Making the enhanced subsidies permanent would require Congress to cast a visible vote on the merits of health coverage rather than allowing procedural expiration to do the political work that accountability should require.
Conclusion
The enhanced premium tax credits enacted in 2021 more than doubled Marketplace enrollment, reduced average premiums by over 44%, and extended coverage to millions of Americans who had previously been priced out of the individual insurance market.[46] Structuring those credits as temporary provisions was a choice, and it was a bad one. It turned a coverage guarantee into a political commodity, renewable on partisan terms rather than on the merits of the coverage it provided. Twenty-two million people’s access to health insurance has depended not on their eligibility or need, but on whether the political arithmetic of a given congressional session happened to favor extension.
These costs fall hardest on communities that already face the greatest barriers to coverage. Black families, who are more likely to live in non-expansion states and less likely to have employer-sponsored insurance, would absorb more than 200 preventable deaths annually, $740 million in additional premium costs, and $1.9 billion in economic losses if the enhanced credits lapse.[47] The administrative costs of repeated uncertainty, the market distortions created by insurer risk-pricing of potential lapse, and the reliance interests of millions of enrollees who organized their finances around continued subsidy availability compound those harms. As Posner and Vermeule establish, nothing in constitutional text, democratic theory, or efficiency analysis requires Congress to design benefits this way. The rule against legislative entrenchment, they argue, “has no deep justification in constitutional text and structure, political norms of representation and deliberation, efficiency, or any other source.”[48]
Congress should convert the enhanced premium tax credits into a permanent statutory entitlement structured on the model of Social Security and Medicare, with income-graduated subsidies continuing as a matter of permanent federal law rather than as temporary provisions requiring periodic renewal. The reform would not eliminate legislative flexibility. Congress could always adjust benefit levels through ordinary majority action. What it would eliminate is the structural default of harm, the design that makes coverage contraction the automatic outcome of inaction. A Congress serious about health coverage should be willing to say so in the text of a permanent statute.
[1]Justin Lo, Larry Levitt, Jared Ortaliza & Cynthia Cox, ACA Marketplace Premium Payments Would More than Double on Average Next Year if Enhanced Premium Tax Credits Expire, Kaiser Fam. Found. (Sept. 30, 2025).
[2]Affordable Care Act, 42 U.S.C. § 18001 (2010).
[3]U.S. Dep’t of the Treasury, Fact Sheet: The Impact of the American Rescue Plan After One Year (Mar. 9, 2022), https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0645.
[4]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Setting The Record Straight On Premium Tax Credit Enhancements (Jan. 20, 2026).
[5]See generally Affordable Care Act, 42 U.S.C. § 18001 (2010).
[6]Cong. Rsch. Serv., Enhanced Premium Tax Credit And 2026 Exchange Premiums: Frequently Asked Questions 1–2 (2025).
[7]Id.
[8]Id.
[9]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Setting The Record Straight On Premium Tax Credit Enhancements, supra note 4.
[10]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Premium Tax Credit Improvements Must Be Extended To Prevent Steep Rise In Health Care Costs (Nov. 14, 2024); see also Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Setting The Record Straight On Premium Tax Credit Enhancements, supra note 4.
[11]Cong. Rsch. Serv., supra note 6.
[12]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Setting The Record Straight On Premium Tax Credit Enhancements, supra note 4.
[13]Lauren Gambino, US House Breaks with Trump to Revive Affordable Care Act Subsidies, The Guardian (Jul. 19, 2017).
[14]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Setting The Record Straight On Premium Tax Credit Enhancements, supra note 4.
[15]Lauren Gambino, supra note 13.
[16]Id.
[17]Lo et al., supra note 1.
[18]Id.
[19]Randy J. Kozel, Settled Versus Right: Constitutional Method and the Path of Precedent, 91 Tex. L. Rev. 1843, 1847 (2013).
[20]Id.
[21]Cong. Rsch. Serv., supra note 6.
[22]Id.
[23]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Setting The Record Straight On Premium Tax Credit Enhancements, supra note 4.
[24]Cass R. Sunstein, Administrative Substance, 1991 Duke L.J. 607, 622 (1991).
[25]Id. at 621.
[26]Id. at 622.
[27]Josh Bivens et al., Failing to Extend the Enhanced ACA Premium Tax Credits Is an Attack on Working-Class Black Families and Major Metro Areas, Econ. Pol’y Inst. (Feb. 9, 2026).
[28]Id.
[29]Id.
[30]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Premium Tax Credit Improvements Must Be Extended To Prevent Steep Rise In Health Care Costs, supra note 10.
[31]Eric A. Posner & Adrian Vermeule, Legislative Entrenchment: A Reappraisal, 111 Yale L.J. 1665, 1667 (2002).
[32]Id. at 1666.
[33]Id. at 1671–72.
[34]Id.
[35]Id.
[36]Id. at 1672.
[37]Sunstein, supra note 24; Posner & Vermeule, supra note 31.
[38]Lo et al., supra note 1.
[39]Cong. Rsch. Serv., supra note 6.
[40]Bivens et al., supra note 27.
[41]Posner & Vermeule, supra note 31, at 1670; Sunstein, supra note 24, at 621.
[42]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Setting The Record Straight On Premium Tax Credit Enhancements, supra note 4.
[43]Id.
[44]Id.
[45]Posner & Vermeule, supra note 31, at 1666.
[46]Ctr. On Budget & Pol’y Priorities, Premium Tax Credit Improvements Must Be Extended To Prevent Steep Rise In Health Care Costs, supra note 10.
[47]Bivens et al., supra note 27.
[48]Posner & Vermeule, supra note 31, at 1666.