Yves here. The headline above is a reworked version of the original: The Price Increases That Should Cause Americans More Alarm. Yours truly retained it to highlight its disingenuousness. Who are these “Americans”? It seems vanishingly unlikely that families and individuals on the receiving end of health insurance rate increases are not very well aware of them and mighty unhappy? But “alarm” suggests some ability to Do Something about them, and aside from perhaps trading to a lower-benefit Obamacare plan, there’s nothing hapless health insurance policy holders can do. So implicitly, the title is directed at policymakers. But you’ll see at the end it blames voters, adding insult to injury. Has author Roenthal been living in a cave while Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others have championed Medicare for All as a way to combat health insurance, Big Pharma, Pharmacy Benefits Manager, and private equity grifting? The fact that “Medicare for All” has become a rally cry is a clear testament to widespread unhappiness about medical costs, including the unnecessary cut taken by private health insurers (both the explicit insurance costs and hidden costs of greatly increased administrative burdens on practitioners)
who thinks average voters have any influence has rocks in his head.
By Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior KFF Health News contributing editor for health news analysis. Previously, she was a correspondent with The New York Times, including at its Beijing bureau., where she covered SARS, bird flu, and the emergence of HIV/AIDS in rural areas. Originally published at KFF Health News
Wary of inflation, Americans have been watching the prices of everyday items such as eggs and gasoline. A less-noticed expense should cause greater alarm: rising premiums for health insurance. They have been trending upward for years and are now rising faster than ever.
Consider that, from 2000 to 2020, egg prices fluctuated between just under $1 and about $3 a dozen; they reached $6.23 in March but then fell to $3.78 in June. Average gas prices, after seesawing between $2 and $4 a gallon for more than a decade starting in 2005, peaked at $4.93 in 2022 and recently fell back to just over $3.
Meanwhile, since 1999, health insurance premiums for people with employer-provided coverage have more than quadrupled. From 2023 to 2024 alone, they rose more than 6% for both individuals and family coverage — a steeper increase than that of wages and overall inflation.
For many people who have the kind of insurance plans created by the Affordable Care Act (because they work for small companies or insure themselves), rates have probably risen even more drastically. In this market, state regulators scrutinize insurers’ proposed rate increases, but only if they exceed 15%.
And the situation is about to get worse: For 2026, ACA marketplace insurers have proposed eye-popping new prices: In New York, UnitedHealthcare has proposed a 66.4% rise. HMO Colorado has asked for an average increase of more than 33% in that state. In Washington, the average proposed increase across all insurers is 21.2%, and in Rhode Island it’s 23.7%.
According to Business Group on Health, a consortium of major employers, “actual health care costs have grown a cumulative 50% since 2017.” In a separate survey published in 2021, 87% of companies said that in the next five to 10 years, the cost of providing health insurance for their workers would become “unsustainable.”
And insurers in the ACA marketplace are increasing premiums by an average of 20% for next year, according to a new analysis. Imagine if tens of millions of Americans’ rent or mortgage payments were to suddenly increase by that amount.
Insurance regulators theoretically could demand that these proposed rates be lowered — and this often happens. But some states are more active than others in this regard. And all are wary that too much regulatory interference could drive insurers from their markets.
Insurers offer many explanations for their calculations, some of which are tied to recent actions by Congress and President Donald Trump. New tariffs on America’s trading partners, for example, are expected to push up the cost of drugs and medical supplies.
Meanwhile, reductions in health care spending included in the GOP budget bill, along with the expiration of some Biden-era premium subsidies at the end of this year, will cause many people to lose their health insurance. About 16 million Americans are expected to become uninsured by 2034, in many cases because keeping insurance will become unaffordable.
Because most of these people are likely to be young and/or healthy, the “risk pool” of those remaining insured will become older and sicker — and therefore more expensive to cover.
“Ultimately, we believe the ACA market will likely be smaller and higher acuity-driven next year,” Janey Kiryluik, vice president of corporate communications for Elevance Health (formerly known as Anthem), wrote in an email. She added: “Our position reflects early disciplined action.”
Remember, most insurers in the United States are public, for-profit companies; as such, they tend to act in the interests of their shareholders, not the patients whose health care they cover.
Large employers that manage their own health care plans might be able to negotiate better deals for their workers. But smaller companies, for the most part, will need to accept what’s on offer.
Premiums are not the only part of health insurance that’s getting more expensive. Deductibles — the money that beneficiaries must spend out-of-pocket before insurance kicks in — are also rising. The average deductible for a standard ACA silver plan in 2025 was nearly $5,000, about double what it was in 2014. (For those with employer-based insurance, the average number is just under $2,000.)
A few states are trying to stem the tide by offering a state-run “public option,” a basic affordable insurance plan that patients can choose. But they have struggled because a lower payment rate for workers generally means fewer participating providers and reduced access to care.
If voters paid as much attention to the price of health insurance as they do to the cost of gas and eggs, maybe elected officials would respond with more action.
This is the perfect situation where “direct action” against the management of these most definitely ‘for profit’ corporations will begin to “make a difference.” The Confraternity of Saint Luigi the Adjuster is not a quietist organization. It follows a long line of ‘activist’ movements. Think the early abolitionists or the early unionists.
Like John Brown before him, Saint Luigi is the harbinger of the storm to come.
The other factor in the extreme rise in medical “costs” is the explosive growth in “corporatized” medicine. Rentierism in the management of medical practices has become the norm. The “official” acceptance of this trend denotes the utter lack of a pro-public policy in American political governance.
Eventually, the mass of the public will come around to the opinion that, rather than continue the exploitation of the public for private gain that is the keystone of the present-day system, burning the entire system down will be preferrable.
This is where the utter lack of any true Left movement in America becomes apparent. Poor old Bernie Sanders comes in for a lot of criticism here, but he did fight the “good fight” for a while, in the existing system of politics. That seems to have been his mistake. He laboured under the misconception that retail politics alone would accomplish his goals. He did not take into account the fact that the previous ‘reform’ movements that succeeded in America often had definitely militant movements in the background offering concrete action in support of the “headline” political movements.
Since the Powers That Be have cast Universal Healthcare as a revolutionary concept, then Revolution is will be. Note that said “revolution” can be from either the Right or the Left. Bismarck, not usually considered the most “progressive” politician understood the societal benefits of centralized, cheap medical care, all the way back in the 1880s.
See: https://www.ahaap.org/bismarck-model
To misquote an infamous line from an American film; “Greed is G–.”
Time to change religions.
Stay safe.
ambrit: Yes. I noticed this in the article:
In New York, UnitedHealthcare has proposed a 66.4% rise.
And I sez to myself, Now what could possibly go wrong?
Saint Luigi the Adjuster, ora pro nobis. Amen.
If you can stand it, read some Wall Street opinions about United Healthcare and how they characterize recent, uh, earnings challenges. There is an entire ecosystem of apologists willing to minimize real human impacts of designed malfeasance in denying or delaying those necessary approvals, prior or otherwise.
An implicit view is that people consume what they want and choose carriers voluntarily. That does not reflect facts on the ground, where sole providers, opacity and misanthropic policies are the rule and not the exception.
Health insurer, another oxymoron. The pols, insurers and investors get theirs, and want you to get yours good and hard. /:
Our political class sees their role as standing between the corporations and the pitchforks so there’s unlikely to be any succor there. Of course the high priests of capitalism have always alleged that economic exploitation is the price we pay for our personal freedom and now even that is under assault, both from Trump’s masked goons and Dem message police with their “fake news” fakery. For both parties Democracy is the last thing they are interested in.
Of course Jefferson did say that the system would have to be periodically refreshed with the “blood of tyrants” but middle class people including yours truly are not fond of violence and anarchy. And it’s also true that much of America is still quite affluent from our post WW2 hegemony with plenty of blood left to be sucked by the leaches.
Personally I think a new respect for honesty might help. There was a time when the upper classes were regarded with both envy and contempt by their exploitees. Stop pretending that these cheese balls with their Met Galas and all the rest of it are respectable people. Let the defeat of socialism–which has really set them off–be only temporary. Nothing to lose but our chains.
I’m going to make a guess as to why health insurance is rising so much and here I will use some outrageous generalizations to explain my idea. So in the past the idea was that you would have a large pool of people kicking in contributions for health insurance to pay out those that did fall sick. I suppose the origins lay with the fraternal societies of the 19th century such as the Grand United Order of Oddfellows. In recent decades I have seen health insurance corporation rise which basically get rid of old or sick people and try to make their “pool” a younger healthy population so they have to pay out less. And to attract those younger people, they can offer cheaper health insurance rates and still make a profit. As for those old and sick people, well, it is all their fault for getting old and/or sick.
So we advance to the 2020s and suddenly this system starts to break down. So what happened? Covid did – or more accurately Long Covid. Suddenly you have Long Covid bounce around that healthy population like a metal ball in a pin-ball machine lighting up people left, right and center. That has to have an effect on premiums as the effected people are putting in claims that may continue for decades. That economic model in use for so many decades starts to break down and more and more people are being effected each and every year. And I suspect that this is what is behind those rising prices in health insurance.
The first thing we need to do is stop calling it insurance. These are not risk bearing organizations. They are fee for no service companies. They may be one of the purest forms of rent extraction operating in society.
Acting as effective monopolists they disguise everything they do and continually raise rates to enhance their bottom lines.
Yes, Janey, you are the very banality of evil:
“Ultimately, we believe the ACA market will likely be smaller and higher acuity-driven next year,” Janey Kiryluik, vice president of corporate communications for Elevance Health (formerly known as Anthem), wrote in an email. She added: “Our position reflects early disciplined action.”
The whole paragraph isn’t even in the English language. It is in a language of marketing, looting, and oppression. “Early disciplined action,” indeed. Leather, lace, or fancy Japanese knots?
Here is Kenneth J. Arrow’s famous paper on medical care, insurance (see header, C. Problems of Insurance), and why health care doesn’t function as a market in the sense of free-market worshipers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110511142954/http://sws1.bu.edu/ellisrp/EC387/Papers/1963Arrow_AER.pdf
The writing is quite clear for an economist. Some of it seems quaint now: Seven dollars for surgery? Majority of hospitals still run as not-for-profits?
Yet the warning was out there long ago: Insurance doesn’t work in health care, and in fact, companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield aren’t true insurers. The effect of money on health care would be to cause physicians to deteriorate as they lost control of the doctor-patient relationship as well as to produce large market-distorting organizations that would grab control of hospitals and other institutions. And Arrow seems to be right.