At the Health Affairs Blog, Coleman Drake, Petra Rasmussen and I lay out some of our concerns about the ACA choice environment in the first of a two part blog post series. The passage of the American Rescue Plan had two major changes to the ACA’s subsidy scheme. First, people who earned over 400% FPL were eligible for subsidies if the benchmark silver plan was more than 8.5% of their income. Secondly, and more importantly, the expected household contribution for lower income buyers who were already subsidy eligible decreased dramatically. Notably, individuals who earned under 150% FPL saw the benchmark premium go from about 4% of income to 0% of income. A massive number of people are now seeing zero premium CSR-94 Silver plans.