Guy who owns a pet supply shop's rates were $950 a month last year. Since the beginning of this year they have been $2860. Next year, they are likely to be $3600.

Who is supposed to be able to pay that?

I mean - someone has to. Right? That's what health care costs. Pet shop guy doesn't seem to entirely understand how the insurance market works:

“Our system is just so broken. This will be me throwing my hands into the air and canceling my health insurance and just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best,” Robokoff said. “I feel like I’m the sucker who isn’t using the insurance as much, and I’m just paying these outrageous premiums to support other people, so I may not wait until the end of the year. I may quit sooner.”

Yeah, that's wrong. It's the other people who were previously paying premiums to support you. Pet shop guy seems to be the one the Anchorage Daily News has in their rolodex to call for a quote on these stories, because here is from last year:

Robokoff said the monthly insurance premium for him and his partner is set to triple, going from $924 in 2025 to $2,886.

“This will pull the rug out from under me,” said Robokoff. “I thought I was doing the things that a society wants its members to do — create new businesses, create new jobs, improve the life of the surrounding community.”

Robokoff said that when he was younger, he went without insurance, but he now relies on medication that would cost thousands of dollars a month without insurance, so forgoing coverage is not an option.

adn.com - Punishing alaska small business owners consider next steps amid steep rises in health care costs

From the photo in the article, he's clearly not a young man, and is already on expensive medication. His health care coverage costs a ton of money. The reason his insurance used to be cheaper is because there were previously a lot of young healthy folks that were in it. They supported his cheaper policy premiums, not the other way around. Their policies were far more expensive (nominally) than they ever would require in health coverage, but because they were so heavily subsidized (perhaps to even being nearly free), they bought them anyway. Now that the subsidies have been slashed, though, they're pulling out of the marketplace, leaving pet shop guy to face the actual cost of his health care coverage.

But he doesn't seem to realize that he was the beneficiary of that support...not the sucker.