The New York State Legislature gaveled out its 2026 session this month and went home. It left behind a deadline it chose not to touch: on July 1, roughly 450,000 New Yorkers are set to lose their health insurance, and Albany passed a state budget that does nothing for them, City & State reported. The state had already set aside the money to keep them covered. It chose not to spend it.

The program is the Essential Plan, New York’s free, no-premium, no-deductible insurance for people who earn too much for Medicaid but not enough to comfortably buy a plan on the open market. It currently covers about 1.6 million New Yorkers. The cut comes from Washington. The federal law known as H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, gutted the funding stream that paid for the Essential Plan’s expanded version, and New York stands to lose an estimated $7.5 billion a year in federal money as a result, according to the Greater New York Hospital Association.

To keep the program alive at all, the state is rolling it back from the original federal Affordable Care Act blueprint, dropping the income ceiling from 250 percent of the federal poverty level to 200 percent. In dollars, the new cap is about $31,300 a year for one person and $42,300 for two, per NY Health Access. Everyone who earns between 200 and 250 percent of the poverty line, roughly $32,000 to $40,000 for an individual or $54,000 to $68,000 for a family of three, gets dropped, THE CITY reported. That is the working poor: home health aides, restaurant workers, gig drivers, the people who make this city run on $35,000 a year.