Priced Out of Health Insurance: What Now?

This week’s video came from a very un-glamorous moment: opening our 2026 health insurance estimate.

Our first ACA quote for next year landed around $33,000 for one year of coverage for the two of us. A newer “lower cost” option is about $24,000, but only if we’re willing to give up our current primary care doctor and move into a different network.

Both numbers are more than double what we paid in 2025.

For a midlife couple who deliberately downsized into a tiny home to lower expenses and buy back time, that was a gut punch. It pushed us into a question we didn’t expect to be asking quite this soon:

What do you do when the cost of health insurance no longer matches the life you’re trying to build?

In tonight’s video (embedded above), we walk through the basics of our situation, what changed for 2026, and the options we’re exploring.

The Awkward Gap

We’re in our 50s and early 60s: too young for Medicare, self-employed, and no employer plan to fall back on. When the enhanced ACA subsidies expired and Congress chose not to extend them, premiums for people in our situation jumped.

The result is that our ACA options for 2026 now live in a range that would require a huge share of our income just to keep the card in our wallet.

We didn’t sell our traditional house, move into a 399-square-foot tiny home, and rebuild our work life just to turn around and hand most of that freedom back to one line item in the budget.

Looking at “Catastrophic First”

Because of that, we’ve started looking at what we’re calling a “catastrophic stack” instead of a traditional, everything-in-one ACA plan.

Very high level, that means:

• Accepting that we will self-insure more of the everyday, predictable stuff
• Focusing our dollars on tools that help if a truly big medical event happens
• Being honest about the risk and reading a lot of fine print

It’s not a magic trick. It doesn’t make healthcare cheap. It just shifts the question from:

“How do we pay whatever they ask?”

to:

“What level of risk can we live with, so we’re not working only to pay premiums?”

If you want to see the actual numbers and hear how we’re thinking through it, the video will walk you through the details.

Choosing a Life, Not Just a Plan

Underneath all of this is a bigger theme we keep coming back to in our tiny-home / midlife reinvention journey:

• We will never run out of bills to pay.
• We will run out of time.

Our goal isn’t to pretend risk doesn’t exist. It’s to make thoughtful choices that leave room for walks, road trips, slow mornings, and time with people we love—now, not just at some distant retirement date.

Health insurance is one part of that equation. Housing, work, and lifestyle choices are the others. None of it is perfect, and most of it lives in the messy middle.

We’d Love to Hear from You

If you’re in a similar spot—too young for Medicare, watching your premiums jump, or trying to figure out health coverage as a self-employed or downsizing household—we’d really love to hear what you’re considering for 2026. Your ideas and experiences might help others feeling stuck, too.

Thank you for being here and walking through this with us. We don’t have all the answers; we’re just sharing the journey as honestly as we can.

If you’d like to follow along as we keep figuring this out:

• Subscribe on YouTube to catch new videos each week
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-Kathy & Bryan