Unaffordability index: Rent, GLP-1s, Obamacare

Adrian Ma (0:01)

N-P-R.

Wailin Wong (0:06)

This is The Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Waylon Wong.

Adrian Ma (0:09)

And I'm Adrian Ma.

Ricky Mulvey (0:10)

I'm Ricky Mulvey.

Wailin Wong (0:11)

And you guys, fall is officially here, and so is...

Ricky Mulvey (0:16)

Indicators of the Week!

Wailin Wong (0:22)

Um, are you guys switching to warm beverages?

Ricky Mulvey (0:25)

Oh, no, bonfires, scarves. Black coffee and beef jerky, it's the same all year round.

Wailin Wong (0:31)

Who are the Ricky Mulvey diet?

Adrian Ma (0:33)

I pulled out a sweatshirt out of the closet for the first time, and it was... I was like, I need to wash this thing first.

But then it was very cozy.

Ricky Mulvey (0:41)

Nice.

Wailin Wong (0:43)

Well, we like to be cozy here in Indicators of the Week. Other... I guess. That's a bad segue, because none of these are very cozy.

Ricky Mulvey (0:50)

Cozy vibes for uncozy economic data.

Wailin Wong (0:53)

Each new season brings a round of fresh headlines, and we are here to make sense of the week's top economic news. So on today's show, we have a growing portion of US adults having trouble paying their rent.

Adrian Ma (1:06)

The Trump administration is booting a lot of people off Obamacare.

Ricky Mulvey (1:10)

And your employer might be dropping GLP-1. That's after the break.

Adrian Ma (1:21)

Okay, Waylon Wong, start us off.

Wailin Wong (1:23)

My indicator is 21.6%.

That is the percentage of middle-income renters who said they had problems paying rent at some point in 2025 This number comes from the Urban Institute. They are a think tank that does research on upward mobility and social policy. And this number, 21.6%, is significantly up from the year before.

Ricky Mulvey (1:45)

Yikes! And you said these are middle-income renters. So how do they even define that?

Wailin Wong (1:49)

Yeah, so middle-income means someone who makes three to five times the federal poverty level. So that's around $31,000 to $63,000 for a single adult. Or if you're looking at a family of three, around $53,000 to $107,000 a year.

Adrian Ma (2:05)

Okay, so even people in this salary range are having trouble paying for housing.

Wailin Wong (2:09)

Yeah, they told the Urban Institute in a survey that they either couldn't make their full rent payment or were late on payment because they couldn't afford it.

Ricky Mulvey (2:17)

Yeah, and if people have missed rent, then they're probably having trouble with other bills and expenses too.

Wailin Wong (2:22)

Yeah, the Urban Institute makes this point about the kind of interconnectedness of all these expenses and how difficult it is for a lot of households now. And they also asked people about their utility bills in this survey. And for 2025, almost 21% of these middle-income renters said that they couldn't pay their full gas, electric or oil bill at some point during the year.

Adrian Ma (2:45)

Hmm. Well, I mean, you've got all those expenses and then you've got groceries and gas and health care.

It's enough to make a person spiral with existential dread. Yes. And speaking of spiraling, I've got an indicator that touches on this. Okay, what is it? 760,000. That is the number of individuals whose Obamacare slash Affordable Care Act health insurance has been canceled because their enrollment was allegedly fraudulent or improper.

Ricky Mulvey (3:16)

I don't have any serious analysis, just yikes, what's going on?

Adrian Ma (3:19)

So Vice President JD Vance announced the move this week along with Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And the agency gave a few reasons for this purge.

For one thing, they say people who are being cut are ineligible for ACA subsidies because their income is too high or because they already have access to employer-provided health care. They also said they've cut people because they lacked certain information on their applications, like social security numbers, or because someone signed them up without their knowledge.

Wailin Wong (3:54)

How did they figure out who had maybe violated some of these things?

Adrian Ma (4:00)

Well, the government says it worked with health insurance companies to identify improper enrollees, but there are still questions about exactly how did they make these determinations. And some advocates are worried that this culling will actually affect people who were legitimately qualified.

Ricky Mulvey (4:17)

Yeah, and this is happening at a time when a lot of people have to drop their ACA plans because they've gotten too expensive.

Adrian Ma (4:24)

Right. And experts predicted this would happen because Congress failed to approve additional subsidies last year.

And even though 23 million people initially signed up for ACA plans last year, only about 19 million are enrolled now.