As Americans Feel Sharp Rise of Healthcare Costs, Advocacy Orgs Launch Ad Campaign Calling Out GOP for Shutdown

As Americans increasingly struggle with healthcare inflation, a new ad campaign is targeting Republicans in Congress over their refusal to extend tax credits that have lowered insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans, which has dragged the government shutdown toward its third week.

The ad campaign was launched by a collection of progressive advocacy groups—including Public Citizen, Indivisible, MoveOn, Fair Share America, People for the American Way, the American Federation of Teachers, SEIU, the National Education Association, and Working Families Power—and is scheduled to appear in each issue of Axios' "Hill Leaders" newsletter this week.

The newsletter that will carry the ad campaign is geared primarily towards those who work on Capitol Hill. Sponsors of the ad campaign hope that members of Congress and their staff will see it and that they will "stand firm in defense of healthcare even as the Trump administration launches cruel and wholly unnecessary firings above and beyond traditional shutdown furloughs."

"Republicans have shut down the government because they have no interest in keeping healthcare affordable for millions of Americans," the ads say. "Doubling insurance premiums is not what Americans need. Enough is enough! We must fight to save healthcare."

The government shut down at the beginning of October after Democrats refused to vote for a GOP funding bill that did not extend Biden-era tax credits for the more than 24 million Americans who purchase health insurance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace.

If the credits are allowed to expire at the end of 2025, KFF estimates that the average recipient's insurance premiums will more than double, from $888 to $1,906 per year, which will result in about 4 million people losing their insurance due to unaffordability, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

This is on top of the roughly 10 million projected by the CBO to lose insurance coverage due to the GOP's massive cuts to Medicaid and other ACA marketplace spending in the Republican budget law.

"Across the country, Americans are urging their representatives to push back against Trump's destructive agenda and fight for a budget that protects access to healthcare and safeguards Congress' authority over federal spending," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen.

The campaign comes as new data shows that the rate of healthcare inflation has already more than doubled in the nine months since US President Donald Trump took office, compared to the previous two years. Between January and August 2025, the Consumer Price Index for medical care has grown by 3.8%, compared to an increase of just 1.8% between January 2023 and January 2025.

In a September Fox News poll, 52% of voters said that Trump has made the economy worse, while just 30% said he's made it better. 81% of respondents said that healthcare costs were a "problem" for their families, with 51% calling them a "major problem."

As a new report from the Groundwork Collaborative points out, these price increases are having an impact on households before most of the changes from the OBBBA are set to go into effect.

In addition to skyrocketing insurance premiums, the bill's cuts to Medicaid have put hundreds of rural hospitals and nursing homes at risk of closure. The law also repeals a portion of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that allowed Medicare to negotiate the costs of several widely used drugs, whose prices have climbed this year. It also introduced new restrictions preventing Medicare recipients from accessing additional financial aid for their premiums and co-pays, with $535 billion worth of cuts to the program scheduled to take effect in 10 years unless Congress intervenes.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration killed a rule that would have wiped $49 billion of medical debt from the credit reports of about 15 million people, which would have opened up their ability to obtain credit. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., also terminated a program that offered free Covid-19 vaccinations to uninsured Americans and is reportedly seeking to eliminate them from the recommended vaccination schedule, which could prevent insurers from covering them.

Maurice Mitchell of Working Families Power, one of the ad's sponsors, said: "It's important that voters know that Republicans would rather shut down the government than lower healthcare costs for our families."