The Brief

For millions of Americans who buy their own health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, the end of the year brings a day of reckoning: It's time to compare benefits and prices, and consider changing to a new plan, or enroll for the first time.

Open enrollment starts Wednesday for the ACA's federal and state exchanges. Consumers can go online, call, or seek help from a broker or other assister to learn their 2024 coverage options, calculate their potential subsidies, or change plans.

In most states, open enrollment lasts through Jan. 15, although some states have different time periods. California's, for example, is longer, open until Jan. 31, but Idaho's runs from Oct. 15 to Dec. 15. In most states enrollment must occur by Dec. 15 to get coverage that begins Jan. 1.

Health policy experts and brokers recommend all ACA policyholders at least look at next year's options, because prices — and the doctors and hospitals in plans' networks — may have changed. Here's what else you need to know.

People bumped from Medicaid may be eligible, and could make it another record year for signups

ACA plans are now well entrenched — an estimated 16.3 million people signed up during open enrollment last year. This year may see even larger numbers. Enhanced subsidies first approved during the height of the COVID pandemic remain available, and some states have boosted financial help in other ways.

In addition, millions of people nationwide are losing Medicaid coverage as states reassess their eligibility for the first time since early in the pandemic. If you're one of those ousted, be aware you could be eligible for an ACA plan. You can sign up as soon as you know you're losing Medicaid coverage — even outside of the open enrollment season.

Assistance from brokers comes with new strings

An important caution: Don't wait until the last minute, especially if you are seeking help from a broker. Consumers this year will be asked to certify that they voluntarily agreed to brokers' assistance and that their income and other information provided by brokers is accurate.

It's a good protection for both parties, said broker Joshua Brooker, founder of PA Health Advocates in Pennsylvania. But brokers are concerned the requirement could cause delays, especially if clients wait until right before the end of open enrollment to apply.

"Brokers will need to stop what they are doing right at the end before they click 'submit' and wait for the consumer to sign a statement saying they reviewed the policy," Brooker said.

Your premiums could go up — shop around

While some health plans are lowering premiums for next year, many are increasing them, often by 2% to 10%, according to a Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker initial review of rate requests. The median increase, based on a weighted average across its plans for each insurer, was 6%.

Premiums, and whether they go up or down, vary widely by region and insurer.

Experts say that's a big reason to log on to the federal website, healthcare.gov, in the 32 states that use it, or on to the insurance marketplace for one of the 18 states and the District of Columbia that run their own. Changing insurers might mean a lower premium.

"It's very localized," said Sabrina Corlette, research professor and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. "People should shop to maximize their premium tax credit, although that might require not only changing to a new insurance plan, but potentially also a new network of providers."

Most people buying their own coverage qualify for the tax credit, which is a subsidy to offset some, or even all, of their monthly premium. Subsidies are based partly on the premium of the second-lowest-priced silver-level plan in a region. When those go up or down, possibly from a new insurer entering the market with low initial rates, it affects the subsidy amount.

Household income is also a factor. Subsidies are on a sliding scale based on income.

Subsidies were enhanced during the pandemic, both to increase the amount enrollees could receive and to allow more families to qualify. Those enhancements were extended through 2025 by President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, passed last year.

Online calculators, including one at healthcare.gov, can provide subsidy estimates.

You may qualify for lower deductibles and copays

In addition to the premium subsidies, most ACA enrollees qualify for reduced deductibles, copayments, and other types of cost sharing if their income is no more than 2.5 times the federal poverty level, or about $75,000 for a family of four, or about $36,450 for a single-person household.

ACA plans are grouped into colored tiers — bronze, silver, gold, and platinum — based largely on how much cost sharing they require. Bronze plans offer the lowest premiums but usually the highest copayments and deductibles. Platinum plans carry the highest premiums but the lowest out-of-pocket expenses for care.

Cost-sharing reductions are available only in silver-level plans and are more generous for those on the lower end of the income scale. New this year: To help more people qualify, the federal marketplace will automatically switch eligible people to a silver plan for next year if they are currently enrolled in a bronze plan, as long as the enrollee has not made an adjustment in coverage themselves.

There are safeguards built in, said insurance expert and broker Louise Norris, so that people are auto-enrolled in a plan with the same network of medical providers and a similar or lower premium. Additionally, nine of the states that run their own marketplaces — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont, and Washington — have enhanced their cost-sharing reduction programs by extending eligibility or increasing benefits.

Some 26-year-olds will get to stay on parents' plans longer

Happy birthday! Existing federal marketplace rules allowing adult children to stay on their parents' plans though the calendar year in which they turn 26, rather than lose coverage on their 26th birthday, were codified into regulation.

States that run their own markets can set similar rules, and some already allow for longer periods on a parent's plan.

Networks may be small — check that your doctors are covered

Insurance plans often try to reduce premiums by partnering with a limited set of doctors, hospitals, and other providers. Those can change year to year, which is why insurance experts like Norris say enrollees should always check their plans during open enrollment to ensure their preferred physicians and medical centers are included in the network.

It's also a good idea, Norris said, to look closely for changes in prescription drug coverage or copayments.

"The general message is, don't assume anything and make sure you check to see who is in the network," Norris said.

Last year, the Biden administration set rules requiring health plans to have enough in-network providers to meet specific driving time and distance standards. A proposal to limit how long patients wait for a routine appointment has been delayed until 2025.

What we still don't know

A few things remain uncertain as the end of the year approaches. For example, the Biden administration proposed this summer to reverse a Trump-era rule that allowed short-term insurance plans to be sold for coverage periods of up to a year.

Short-term plans are not ACA-compliant, and many have fewer benefits and can set restrictions on coverage, including barring people with health conditions from purchasing them. As a result, they are far less expensive than ACA plans. The Biden proposal would restrict them to coverage periods of four months, but the rule isn't final.

Also pending: a final rule that would allow people to sign up for ACA coverage if they were brought to the U.S. as children by parents lacking permanent legal status — a group known as "Dreamers."

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display