Scott Perry Healthcare Cost of Living Pennsylvania

Scott Perry Voted to Cut Your Health Care — Then He Called Saving It a 'Colossal Mistake'

As health premiums spike across central Pennsylvania, Rep. Scott Perry co-signed an op-ed calling it a 'colossal mistake' to make permanent the ACA tax credits that kept his own constituents covered.

MAGA Report Cards · Jul 24, 2026

New data from the Pennsylvania Democratic Party says more than 12,400 of Rep. Scott Perry's constituents have already been forced to drop their health insurance. That's not a surprise. It's the direct result of choices Perry made — and keeps making.

Perry voted for the healthcare cuts. And last fall, before premiums exploded across central Pennsylvania, he fought to make it worse: he called making permanent the tax credits that kept his constituents covered a "colossal mistake."

The "colossal mistake"

The enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits — the help that lowered monthly premiums for people who buy their own insurance — were set to expire at the end of 2025. Extending them would have kept coverage affordable for hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians.

Perry didn't want to extend them. In September 2025 he signed a Newsweek op-ed with Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Harris, three other House Republicans and the head of the National Taxpayers Union arguing the credits should die. "Washington is now flirting with the idea of making them permanent," it said. "That would be a colossal mistake." Keystone Newsroom and Fox43 both reported it.

Let that sink in. The "colossal mistake," in Scott Perry's view, is helping you pay for a doctor.

What it does to his own district

This isn't abstract. Pennie's projections for Perry's PA-10 district, reported by Keystone Newsroom, showed brutal price hikes once those credits expired:

A 60-year-old married couple earning about $82,000 would see their premium jump from $581 a month to $2,934 a month — a 405% increase.
A family of four earning about $78,000 would see their premium more than double, from $260 to $541 a month.

Statewide, more than 435,000 Pennsylvanians bought coverage through Pennie, the state marketplace, in 2024. Without the credits, average premiums were projected to rise about 82%, and Pennie officials feared up to 270,000 Pennsylvanians would lose coverage from the expiration combined with the ACA changes in Trump's budget bill. In Perry's part of the state, premiums have risen by an average of about 177%, according to the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

These are working families, retirees a few years short of Medicare, and small-business owners. Perry represents them. He's choosing to let their costs explode.

He already voted to take coverage away

The premium spike is only half of it. Perry also voted for the broader Republican healthcare cuts. The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff estimates that in PA-10 alone, 22,278 people are projected to lose health coverage from those cuts and the lapse of the tax credits together — about 4,800 losing ACA coverage and 17,478 losing Medicaid.

This fits a career-long pattern. Perry has voted 12 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and once compared the ACA to "slavery and prohibition." He has spent 13 years in Congress trying to take away the very coverage his constituents depend on. Now the bills are coming due — literally, in the form of premium notices landing in mailboxes across York, Cumberland, and Dauphin counties.

Who he actually works for

If you want to know why Perry keeps voting this way, look at who funds him. His top donors include Club for Growth, the Freedom Caucus Fund, private-equity giant Blackstone, and the insurance-broker lobby. These are the interests that profit when public programs shrink and people are pushed into paying more.

And true to form, Perry won't face the people he's hurting. He hasn't held an in-person town hall since 2019. When hundreds packed a "Perry-less" town hall just outside Harrisburg, he wasn't there. And when the Associated Press went looking for him during a congressional recess, on many days no one answered the phone at any of his four offices.

A congressman who votes to strip your coverage, calls it a "colossal mistake" to make permanent the help that let you keep it, and then won't even show up to explain himself — that's not representation. That's abandonment.