Open enrollment for 2027 Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage opens in most states and runs through Jan. 15, with average benchmark premiums up about 13% and the enhanced federal subsidies gone. AP News
November 2051 · if it all works out · Pittsburgh
Lawrenceville to the Strip District
He lives in Lawrenceville in Pittsburgh, in a brick row house on 44th Street. At 6:40 the kitchen panel shows the river levels, the bus times and the day’s power price, low this morning because the wind turbines on the Laurel Highlands ridges are turning hard. The house is heated by a ground loop drilled under the alley the year the whole block came off gas. He packs two lunches, walks his son to the school on the corner, and keeps going to work.
He builds chairs and tables in an old bakery on Penn Avenue: three workers, one router, one finishing booth. The walnut and cherry come down the Allegheny on an electric barge from a co-op forest in Elk County, cut on a long rotation and tagged board by board. Before eight a family in Columbus orders a dining set from the shop’s page. The planning program lays out the cuts, prices the wood, and books a slot on the electric freight line to Ohio for the second week of December. The second order of the morning is from a hotel in Kharkiv, in Ukraine: twelve chairs to stand beside tables from an oak mill outside Lviv that he trades patterns with. His father’s generation knew Kharkiv as a city under air raids. The rebuilding that turned it into a place that orders chairs was planned in rooms in Brussels; on November 5, 2026, Ukraine, the United States, Europe’s big three and NATO sat down at NATO headquarters on the security guarantees for after the war, the day after the talks on rebuilding the country.
At ten he opens the family’s health coverage for the coming year, because it is November and the sign-up season opened on the first, the way it has since long before he was born. It takes four minutes. Each plan shows its full yearly cost in dollars at the top, the same doctors at Allegheny General and the UPMC clinics sit in every plan, and the tax credit is already subtracted. His coverage follows him, not the job, so each of his three workers carries a plan of their own and the shop pays into them like any other payroll line. The fourth stool at the router is an apprentice who starts Monday, hired off a county board that lists every opening with its pay; hiring like that was news on November 6, 2026, when employers added 165,000 jobs in October against the 65,000 forecast and unemployment slipped to 4.1%. The apprentice is nineteen, aged out of foster care in Beaver County, and finished the two-year furniture program at the community college with the tuition and her rent paid by the permanent fund every college in the state keeps for students who came through the system. Those funds were scattered and small at first; on November 7, 2026, Melania Trump stood on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge before the Alabama game and announced a $5 million endowment for them there. His father still talks about November 1, 2026, when the sign-up season opened with premiums up about 13% on average and the extra federal help gone. The price rules that came out of those years are why this morning’s number is lower than last year’s.
Lunch is pierogies from the Polish deli on Butler Street, eaten on the bench outside the shop. A cargo bike from the Strip District drops off the week’s box: greens from a rooftop farm across the river, apples from Washington County, a loaf from the bakery that moved two doors down when he took its old room.
At two he rides the electric bus over the 40th Street Bridge to see his mother on the North Side. She is eighty-one and lives on her own, with a nurse who stops in twice a week and a wristband that sends her blood pressure to her doctor overnight. Her new hip went in last spring at a price the hospital posted before she booked the date. On her table is the ballot for next Tuesday’s city council and school board races, mailed to every voter in the county with the postage paid; she will walk it to the drop box at the Carnegie library. Everyone in the state is registered on their eighteenth birthday now, and the count is final the night of the vote. She has not missed a November since November 3, 2026, when she voted in the midterms on her way to work, the year early voting ran ahead of the last midterm and control of Congress was on the ballot. She woke the next morning, November 4, to find both the House and the Senate already called overnight, Democrats taking both, when she had expected a week of waiting; the same-night count grew out of that. She walks him to the bus stop without a cane.
He picks his son up from robotics club at five, and they eat dinner on the back steps while it is still light enough. After, they walk down to the riverfront trail along the Allegheny. The water is clean enough that two women are pulling a kayak out at the ramp, and a man is cleaning a smallmouth bass to take home. A woman coming off the trail from Washington has a walker’s pass clipped to her pack, one card that lets people on foot cross borders without stopping for visas. It came out of the years after November 2, 2026, when Karl Bushby walked the last three miles to his mother’s house in Hull, England, twenty-eight years and 31,000 miles after leaving the tip of Chile, and said red tape had cost him more time than the Bering Strait. Wood, barge, order, freight, hotel, plan, hire, scholarship, price, nurse, hip, ballot, count, bus, river, pass — a full working day in a city that kept its trades.
November 2076 · if it all works out · Kansas City
Brookside to the West Bottoms
She lives in Brookside in Kansas City with her twelve-year-old daughter and her grandmother, who is ninety-four and has the back bedroom. At 6:15 the house is warm off the block battery under the sidewalk, charged overnight from the wind farms in western Kansas. The kitchen wall shows the streetcar times and, next to them, her grandmother’s morning pills, which a pharmacy cart dropped at the door at five.
She takes the streetcar up Main Street. The line runs from the airport to the river and out to the university now, every four minutes, free to ride. She gets off at Union Station and walks down the hill into the West Bottoms.
Her lab is in an old stockyards warehouse. Her team breeds perennial wheat and drought-hardy sorghum for farms in Kansas and Missouri. A field of perennial wheat is planted once every five years, and its roots reach ten feet down and hold the soil through the dry summers. Seed samples come in by drone from Salina and Emporia before nine. By noon the gene reads are back, and she sends three farmers in Ford County the lines that held up best in last year’s heat, and the same lines to a breeding station outside Poltava, in Ukraine’s black-soil belt. The reads come back to the newest breeder on her team, who grew up in foster care in Wichita and holds a plant-science degree from K-State that cost him nothing, tuition and housing both, out of the endowment every state university keeps for students from the system. His professor once showed him the photo from the start of it: November 7, 2026, a Saturday at LSU in Baton Rouge, where Melania Trump announced a $5 million permanent fund for those students before the Alabama game. The two plains have traded seed every season she has worked. Her grandmother remembers when Ukraine’s fields were mined and its ports were shelled; the peace that ended that came with a plan to rebuild the country and guarantees to keep it safe, worked out in Brussels, where on November 5, 2026, Ukraine and its allies met at NATO headquarters on those guarantees a day after the talks on rebuilding.
At one she walks to the neighborhood clinic for her yearly checkup. Her coverage is one card she has carried since birth; it pays the clinic directly, the same card in every state, and the visit ends with a printed plan and nothing to sign. Her daughter’s civics class is studying the old November sign-up seasons this month, starting with the one that opened on November 1, 2026, when marketplace premiums rose about 13% on average and the extra federal help had run out. The assignment is to ask someone over seventy what a deductible was. Today the class has a second question, because it is Election Day, November 3, 2076, and schools are closed for it like the rest of the country: ask the same person about the first November they remember voting.
In the afternoon she takes a wall call with seed growers in Nebraska, then walks the levee trail home toward the station. The Kansas River floodplain below the levee is a restored wetland park, and there are sandhill cranes in it this week, stopping on their way south. At the north end a marker shows the Americas footpath, one route from the tip of Chile to the Bering Strait with a shelter every day’s walk. Two walkers pushing carts pass her going north, five months out of Punta Arenas. Her daughter learned in school whose walk it follows: Karl Bushby walked it on his way home to Hull, England, and arrived at his mother’s door on November 2, 2026, after twenty-eight years on foot.
At home her daughter has the assignment open on the table. Her grandmother tells it plainly: she was forty-four in 2026, and she spent November evenings at a laptop comparing plans for herself and two kids, a spreadsheet of premiums and deductibles taped to the fridge. The girl writes it down word for word. Then the second answer: November 3, 2026, the midterms, a line at her polling place before work and a sticker on her coat, the year early voting ran ahead of the last midterm and the House and Senate were both on the ballot. Before dinner the two women vote on the kitchen wall. It takes each of them under five minutes, and the national count is final before the porch gets cold. Her grandmother says that was new once: on the morning of November 4, 2026, she woke to find the House and the Senate both called overnight, Democrats taking both, and told the kids at breakfast she had expected to wait a week. That same week, on Friday, November 6, 2026, the jobs report came in at 165,000 new jobs for October when only 65,000 were forecast, with unemployment down to 4.1%; she read it standing at her stove, forty-four and glad of her own work, and she still opens the monthly count on the first Friday out of habit.
Dinner is burnt ends from a pasture farm in Clay County and sorghum bread from her own lab’s test flour. After the dishes the three of them sit on the porch. The city switched to warm, shielded streetlights years ago, and on a clear night in Brookside you can see the Milky Way. Battery, streetcar, seed, drone, wheat, Poltava, endowment, card, clinic, civics, ballot, count, jobs, levee, cranes, footpath, porch — a full day in a city that grows what the plains eat.