The Trump administration killed the subsidy holding down Medicare drug plan premiums. Pappas is fighting to restore it, and says likely Senate rival John Sununu stands with Big Pharma.
The Trump administration is ending the federal subsidy that has held down premiums on stand-alone Medicare prescription drug plans, a decision with particular reach in New Hampshire, where about 174,000 people are enrolled in exactly that kind of coverage.
In an interview with The Granite Post on July 30, Congressman Chris Pappas, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate, called the decision “insane.”
“This decision to cancel a subsidy for premiums on Part D for seniors in New Hampshire and across the country, it’s insane. It makes no sense, it’s gonna raise prices for seniors,” Pappas said, at a moment when, in his words, “we’re living through a cost of living crisis.”
Drug costs kept coming up Monday when Pappas sat down for a roundtable on Social Security at the Bridge Cafe in Manchester with Granite State seniors and Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, whose political action committee endorsed him at the event.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) confirmed on July 28 that it will let the Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration expire at the end of the 2026 plan year, a move first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The program launched in 2025 to smooth out premium spikes as insurers adjusted to the Inflation Reduction Act’s redesign of the drug benefit, which capped seniors’ out-of-pocket costs while shifting more expense onto the plans. The demonstration is steering about $3.6 billion to insurers this year, and it has kept the average stand-alone premium near $36 a month for roughly 25 million enrollees nationwide.
How much premiums climb without it is already in dispute. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, who has dismissed the program as a bailout for insurance companies, wrote on X that “premiums will go up by less than $10 for most Medicare recipients.” The Journal’s reporting points higher, with nearly half of enrollees likely to see increases in the $11 to $20 a month range. The premiums people will actually pay become public in mid-to-late September, when CMS releases final 2027 plan figures, just ahead of the Oct. 15 start of open enrollment and weeks before the November election.
Pappas is pressing CMS to reverse course before then. This week he led 50 members of Congress in a letter to Oz urging the agency to reinstate the demonstration, citing enrollment growth from 22.8 million in 2024 to 24.9 million in 2026 and writing that “lower costs and a rise in covered individuals indicate that the demonstration is working.” The letter demands answers on what analysis, if any, CMS ran on premium increases for people living on fixed incomes. “It’s despicable, and the administration must reverse this decision immediately,” Pappas said in a statement accompanying the letter.
New Hampshire relies more heavily on stand-alone coverage than much of the country. A KFF analysis found the Granite State among those where stand-alone plans cover half or more of Part D enrollees across both its urban and rural areas, and CMS enrollment data show 173,885 New Hampshire residents in the plans as of February, out of roughly 351,000 total Medicare enrollees statewide. People who get drug coverage through Medicare Advantage are largely insulated: their average drug premium runs about $8 a month, and the expiring subsidy never applied to their plans.
In endorsing Pappas, Richtman cited his “hundred percent voting record” with the committee, and said that while he normally doesn’t name opponents at endorsement events, “this Senate race is a little different.”
“They’ve earned it, they’ve paid into it all of these years,” said Ellen Roy, a Manchester senior who spoke at the roundtable, singling out Medicare Part D as the program that “concerns me terribly.”
Lee Drysdale, another Manchester senior, pointed straight at drug costs: “Every time you turn around insurance companies get ways of wiggling and increasing your copayments and the cost of medication is very high.” Drysdale said medication costs and supplemental insurance are the big concerns among seniors at Manchester’s Cashin Senior Center.
“I am really concerned about what happened last year when my providers left the state. People got caught with no insurance,” Drysdale said. The state’s Medicare Advantage market has contracted by half, from 38 plans in 2025 to 19 in 2026.
Pappas, speaking on the 61st anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid being signed into law, said the program is “as important as it has ever been to make sure people get access to care and access to medications.” He argued the administration “continues to say that affordability is a hoax” even as costs rise.
“They’re clearly not listening to the American people,” he said.
“Whether it’s this move, the effort to cut ACA premium subsidies, which has raised costs for tens of thousands of New Hampshire families, or the efforts to gut Medicaid, which are gonna deny coverage for thousands more people here in the Granite State,” Pappas said. “This is a crisis for healthcare in New Hampshire.”
Pappas made clear he intends to carry the fight into the Senate race against likely Republican nominee John E. Sununu, pointing to the former senator’s record on health care votes.
Health care affordability has already become a dividing line in New Hampshire’s 2026 races.
“He stands with corporate special interests with big pharma and the insurance companies every step of the way. That’s who he voted with when he was a U.S. senator representing New Hampshire,” Pappas said, calling Sununu “the person that is the least equipped to be able to lower costs and fight for affordable healthcare.”
In Congress, Sununu voted for a tax holiday that resulted in an estimated $30 billion in tax savings for the pharmaceutical industry. Between 2003 and 2004, Sununu repeatedly voted for a tax holiday that would have allowed companies to reduce taxes from 35% to 5.25% on repatriated foreign-earned income.
On the campaign trail, Sununu has consistently sided with the pharmaceutical industry on Medicare drug price negotiation and attacked legislation that allowed Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices as “reckless spending.”
“This is gonna be an issue that we talk a lot about in the coming weeks,” Pappas said, “because it’s personal to families all across the state.”
