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This is from a guy who works for a healthcare advocacy group in New Mexico:

Just got off the phone w/ a consumer who was crying bc she couldn’t afford a 25% increase. With subsidies, her premium went down 1%. https://t.co/KYR4uhW6tC — Colin Baillio (@colinb1123) October 25, 2016 Getting panicked calls all day about premium hikes. Every person I talked to was shielded by subsidies or on employer plan. #headlinesmatter — Colin Baillio (@colinb1123) October 25, 2016

I don’t want to minimize the pain that this year’s premium hikes are going to cause for a subset of insurance buyers. But the vast majority of low-to-mid-income Obamacare users are eligible for federal subsidies—and as premiums go up, so do their subsidies. They may end up paying a bit more in 2017 for their health coverage, but probably no more than a few percent.

So yes: headlines matter. Or, at the very least, the first few paragraphs of news stories matter. Coverage of this issue should make it clear that the average price people pay will go up much less than 25 percent, and for low-income folks it probably won’t go up at all.