The following works were created during the 2025-2026 Open Enrollment Period (OEP), a narrow window of time during which people on California's State-based exchange (also known as Covered California) can enroll in or make changes to health insurance plans. This OEP was notable because at the end of 2025, our federal legislators allowed certain COVID-era enhanced subsidies (known as EPTC) to expire, significantly increasing the healthcare costs for a huge percentage of people in the US.
I work as a licensed health insurance agent for a free service that assists California residents with navigating the labyrinth of the US healthcare system. This fall and winter I did my best to support our clients as they faced impossible choices about the future of their healthcare coverage. In many cases, there was little I could do to help, and a feeling of failure continues to haunt me. Filled with anger and sadness, I began to document and collect the increases in healthcare premiums from 2025-2026, and that data is what you see woven into this sculpture. I used beeswax, salvaged paper, medical X-ray light boxes, and woven textiles to process my grief of living in a system that values profit over human lives.
The expiration of EPTC created a “subsidy cliff,” causing people making $1 over the income threshold to lose all of their financial assistance. For a single person this cliff is set to $62,600/year, but in Alameda County in 2025 you could make $84,850/year and still be considered low-income according to the CA Dept. of Housing. A family of four lost their subsidies at $128,600/year, but in 2025 in Marin County low-income was considered earning less than $148,650/year. Anticipating that a significant portion of their low-use clientele would drop coverage due to the rate hikes, health insurance companies raised their premiums, compounding the issue. This Open Enrollment Period, Covered California saw a 30% loss of enrollees, suggesting that many people have been forced to go uninsured because they simply can’t afford the cost of their monthly premiums. Furthermore, after a 2025 ruling by the CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services), all DACA recipients were mercilessly kicked off of their Covered California plans with only a month’s notice, with no option but to pay full price for the cost of their health insurance coverage.
An EPTC extension that would restore the expired subsidies passed the House but has now stalled out in the Senate. Our current administration continues to push high-deductible catastrophic plans as the solution to the healthcare crisis while our lawmakers enjoy the most elite level of healthcare coverage available. The US enthusiastically spends billions of dollars on the expansion of empire while its residents are having to choose between paying rent and paying for their cancer treatments. This is unconscionable. We must fight for an end to war and for a national single-payer health system now.
