Coloradans who have health insurance through Obamacare exchange will need help.

It was certainly bad news coming out of the Colorado Division of Insurance on Wednesday that insurance premiums will jump an average of 27 percent when those buying insurance for 2018 go to the individual marketplace looking for plans.

The marketplace, which serves a minority of Colorado residents who don’t qualify for Medicaid and don’t get their insurance through an employer, has been getting more expensive every year at an unsustainable rate.

What’s causing the rise is a multifaceted problem that begins with the sheer cost of health care in the United States, but is more complicated than that. Likely, not enough young healthy Coloradans are buying insurance on the market and instead paying a tax penalty known as the individual mandate. An older, sicker population is more expensive to insure.

Some continue to game the system — buy insurance one year and cram multiple years’ worth of medical care into a single fiscal year under one deductible and then promptly drop insurance. Who can blame them when deductibles are so high?

And finally, all of the plans on the health exchange offer a high bar of coverage set by the Affordable Care Act. The list of mandates is long, and while coverage is important, it’s also expensive.

There was some good news in the report from the Division of Insurance, however.

Rocky Mountain Health Plans — the sole insurance provider for Mesa County — will only increase premiums by 11.5 percent. That’s still a hefty increase, but it could be much worse. Cigna plans will increase 30.9 percent, for example.

As Republicans and Democrats try to muster the humility to tackle this problem together, they should keep some key facts in mind.

First, it’ll actually be the federal government that pays for much for these increases. Obamacare premium tax credits are not a set dollar amount but rather are based on keeping premiums below a set percentage of an individual’s income. So when premiums increase and wages don’t, the federal government picks up the tab. According to Connect for Health — the non-profit entity that runs Colorado’s online exchange — in 2016 Coloradans received $318.5 million in tax credits. And 55 percent of all customers received some financial assistance.

The price increases will hit the 45 percent of Coloradans who aren’t receiving tax subsidies the hardest. The cutoff for tax credits is 400 percent of the federal poverty level, or $48,240 for an individual and $98,400 for a family of four. Those just above the cap have an increasingly difficult decision to make about whether to go uninsured.

In the 19 states that didn’t expand Medicaid to those who make up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, there’s another crisis afoot. In those states, except Wisconsin, it’s actually the small number of people who don’t qualify for Medicaid but make too little to get Obamacare subsidies who feel premium increases the most. Fortunately, Colorado participated in the expansion, so no one here faces the Medicaid gap, but it’s an issue Congress must address.

Many of Colorado’s congressional members had something to say about the premium increases. Most called for a bipartisan effort to stabilize the market, while pointing a few fingers at who is to blame for this situation.

We don’t really care whether it was President Barack Obama’s originally flawed plan or President Donald Trump’s failed endeavor to fix it that drove the premium increases this year. We’d just like it to get fixed, hopefully before premium prices get set for 2019 and consumers on the individual market suffer again.