Article from The Daily Caller by Julia Cohen.

The federal government will spend $17 billion on individual health insurance market subsidies in 2018, according to a Monday report from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services.

The average subsidy rose from $373 in 2017 to $520 in 2018, a an increase of 39 percent, according to the report .

The reason for the increase in premium subsidies is the increase in premiums, the report states. Premiums rose 21 percent from 2016 to 2017, and an additional 27 percent from 2017 to 2018.

However, decrease in unsubsidized individual market enrollees is accelerating both of these trends. Unsubsidized enrollment decreased 20 percent from 2016 to 2017, according to the report. In contrast, subsidized enrollment only decreased 3 percent in the same time period.

Read the entire article at The Daily Caller.

Image Credit: By SeanMack (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons