From the Wall Street Journal. Nothing to see here. Move along…

The Average Cost of a Family Health Insurance Plan Is Now $27,000

Higher spending on chronic diseases, weight-loss drugs and hospital bills help drive the increase

“The cost of health insurance rose steeply for a third year in a row in 2025, reaching just under $27,000 for a family plan, according to an annual survey from the nonprofit KFF, which provides the broadest picture of U.S. employer health coverage.

…The cost is rising faster than inflation, and economists and business leaders said it could bite into employment and wage growth.

“If healthcare costs go up faster than the economy in general, that means there’s less money left over to go to wages,” said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president at KFF.”

A quick reminder: the employer offered healthcare model arose essentially by accident. During WWII, wages were frozen, and companies began offering extra benefits as a way to compete for labor (2 ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF EMPLOYMENT-BASED HEALTH BENEFITS | Employment and Health Benefits: A Connection at Risk | The National Academies Press).

Here’s the thing: Any organization that offers healthcare coverage, insurance or reimbursement, is actually in two lines of business: 1) whatever product/service they offer, and 2) healthcare. And for most of the organizations, #2 - healthcare - is not their core competency.

This is, not to be overly dramatic, insane. Ok - maybe that’s a bit dramatic - but it is basically true.

The employer-sponsored healthcare model has two distinct major disadvantages (and many more minor ones as well). First, it increases costs for whatever product/service a specific company sells (every vehicle made in America has a hidden premium (or a hidden tax) of several thousand dollars due to healthcare costs incurred by the company producing that vehicle). Second, every USA-based company is less competitive against foreign competitors due to this “hidden healthcare tax” baked into their corporate costs.

No other country in the developed world utilizes this ridiculous model for covering the costs of healthcare for its population.

This has to change…

NEXT: why the USA healthcare “system” is not really one system, but actually a hodge-podge of several systems, reducing effectiveness, efficiency and [propping up cost.

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TBone Dinosaur1 year ago

Instead of "healthcare," I'd substitute a new word for health insurance: healthcost.

TBone Dinosaur1 year ago

Healthcost insurance

James Powell1 year ago

There are many issues in changing. Resistance from the industry and from people who may not love their employer based health insurance, but feel they have earned it and do not want to give it up for any government system that they are sure will be worse.

Not saying it's impossible, but the barriers are such that only a major crisis of a size and duration like the Great Depression or World War II.

Do you have suggestions for how that resistance might be overcome?

mister mixAuthor1 year ago

I’d be interested in Joe's thoughts on this, too.

Joe is Wypoxic1 year ago

No easy answer. The change would have to be legislative, so those who support a change (both electeds & others) must put on a full court press to make this a priority. Working to elicit the support of large corps who would likely save millions getting this "non-core competency off their respective plates would be a start. Experience tells me this won't succeed unless there is truly a popular groundswell of support/pressure on electeds. A mass advertising campaign, grassroots organizations (even astroturf orgs) to push the issue into the general consciousness would also help.

Like everything else, its all about educating the public. We would also need to find a way to blunt the money/lobbying effort that private healthcare orgs would pour into opposing such a move. Right now, there may be an opening for that (UNH Medicare fraud, the expiring ACA tax credits). But it will take a constant, unrelenting message, at which Dem and progressive electeds are not very good...

James Powell1 year ago

What's a metaphor for the opposite of low hanging fruit?

r po1 year ago

"Working to elicit the support of large corps..."

I'm pretty sure based on the lack of support of bigcorps for universal health insurance over the last 100 years that they are all in on the barrier to entry for startups and smaller competitors. When I was hired into a small consultancy back in the '90s ISTR there were legal barriers for smaller corps providing health insurance if they had less than 10 employees.

And, right now, it is, uh, suboptimal how much of a headache and general PITA the ACA is compared with the SO's ex-25 year tenure at a not giant but still big old fashioned manufacturing corp. All upper management types she ever interacted with were/are MAGA.

The quality of the insured healthcare was generally immaterial. Surprisingly bad outside of big cities, just fine in big cities. But the red tape overhead is/was vastly lower than the ACA. And the corp minions would go to bat against the insurers on those magical ballooning bills.

r po1 year ago

My comment is NOT to be read as any sort of endorsement for employer provided health insurance. The ACA in its original form was a colossal QoL advance for the many millions without bigcorp/bigorg health insurance. And once passed, the ACA meant that even corp provided insurance didn't discriminate on health preconditions. Which was pretty much on the table by the late 2000s.

Good politics means not hyper focusing on efficiency that leads to trading the psychic expense of inflicting Kafkaesque hassles while navigating health related stress on la gente so that, (is it clear now?) arbitrary budget goals are "revenue neutral" or a ton of other useless consultant-speak bullshit.

I will say it again I have friends in half a dozen European countries who think what we're doing here is bizarre, even incomprehensible.

John S.1 year ago

@r po

Excellent comments. I completely understand where you’re coming from, and I’ve seen some crazy things happen with insurance throughout various employers.

But yeah, our system is pretty broken. And it’s gonna need more than some band-aids to fix it.

The Self-Own of Employer Offered Healthcare Coverage

The Average Cost of a Family Health Insurance Plan Is Now $27,000

Higher spending on chronic diseases, weight-loss drugs and hospital bills help drive the increase

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