During an October 2025 discussion of the federal government shutdown and the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, John Kiriakou offered his own premium as a data point. His co-host had been describing basic marketplace plans in New York City running to $1,400 or $1,600 a month with $10,000 deductibles. Kiriakou’s answer was that his own plan cost him $9.83 a month.[1]
The doctor’s question
The figure came with a story attached. Kiriakou said that at his most recent appointment his doctor had asked him why he carried that particular insurance at all.[1] He does not, in the exchange, give the doctor’s reasoning or his own answer; the remark stands as a comment on what a heavily subsidised marketplace plan actually buys.
The conversation in which the figure appears was about the political stakes of the subsidies rather than the quality of the coverage. Kiriakou and Ted Rall were discussing the shutdown then in progress, the October and November enrolment deadlines, and what would happen to people whose subsidised premiums were about to rise sharply. Kiriakou’s contribution was to point out how far apart two people on the same marketplace could be — one paying under ten dollars, another paying more than a thousand.[1]
Why the figure matters in his account
The premium is one of the few concrete personal financial details Kiriakou has volunteered about his life after prison. He has said elsewhere that he lost his federal pension on conviction and expects to work indefinitely. The subsidised plan sits in that context: it is what the marketplace produces for someone with his income, in his county, under the subsidy structure that was the subject of the shutdown fight.
He does not present it as an endorsement. In his telling it is offered flatly, as a number, immediately after his co-host’s much larger number, and the doctor’s incredulity is left to do the editorial work.[1]