How much are you paying for Health Insurance in 2026?

I work for the county for me and my wife I pay $86 dollars a week for Anthem Blue Cross which equates to $4,482 yearly.

I'm fortunate and feel sorry for those seeking private coverage, or someone that works for a small business.

 

I simply won't have health insurance. It's impossible to get decent value for something I rarely use. I'd love to just pay more taxes and have universal healthcare.

 

About $3,400/yr for the medical part for the family thru my company. Not really problematic for me at all. But most people don't work for a fortune 500 company.

This online calculator tells me if I was buying a silver plan on the individual healthcare exchange, it would cost me ~$15k/year. Yeah, I can see how this issue is a political third rail. But, I think Trump is probably going to unveil the solution in about 2 weeks.

 

I can't tell if people are being sarcastic anymore.

 

mine is increasing from $540/mo to $650.

also i have to remind texxx/jorge/mojoman/strosb4bros/conquistador that tariffs are a tax on the consumer. "we" didnt make $200 billion in tariffs.

 

My brother and his wife would have to pay 60K a year to get almost equal coverage on their own. This is the reason he hasn't retired yet. They can afford it but writing that check every month for insurance they are hoping to not use it is just crazy.

 

That sounds like Medicare. Only 6 percent of medicare goes to administration and there is no marketing to spend on either.

 

No one pays more than the subsidizaurz of the innovation for the treatments the development of which they financed.

 

The health insurance industry serves its intended purpose flawlessly - to act as a smokescreen for the over-lubed fraud orgy between privately owned hospitals, the AMA, and big pharma.

 

parroted convenient claim

Canada has universal health care, much less expensive than the US.

Canada's life expectancy is ~83, ~79.6 for the US

https://www.bing.com/search?q=life expectancy in US vs canada&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=16930194

 

Rocket River
Kick that can down the Road

 

That's absolutely true.

Are you proposing Obama Death Panels? Cuz if you set a $ limit, people who succeed that limit die. The ACA actually banned most plans from setting limits, possibly because of the BS criticism they were getting about death panels.

But, I'm cool with dollar limits. Yeah, people will die, but how much trouble should society go to keeping a very sick person alive anyway.

I don't think the taxpayer subsidy is any problem in this case (apart from the principal/agent problem that I'll get to). The beneficiary of taxpayer-paid healthcare is everybody and the payor is everybody. So that's not the problem. The problem is how much we charge for the actual healthcare, which is far higher than what every other country pays for healthcare.

And I suspect the principal/agent problem (that the principal pays but the agent decides what he will pay for, giving the agent an incentive to overspend) is a big driver. Nationalized healthcare as the principal is an impediment to spending -- for which it is often criticized because it is slower, less ambitious, and less innovative than a market-based system -- so those countries bureaucratically resist the overspending predilections of their agents, the patients. But in our market-based system, insurance companies try to resist overspending but are punished by the market for denying coverage. So they allow too much and then bill us what that costs. Smart hospitals, pharma companies, device companies, and the whole ecosystem of medical provision recognize the weakness and build business models to exploit it, maximizing how much they can harvest out of a system that can't say, 'no, it's not worth it.'

We have a mixed economy. I work in the utility industry where the distribution of electricity is treated as a natural monopoly with a single, regulated provider. That makes sense. We don't really want redundant poles and wires festooning our cities. It would underutilize expensive capital assets and clutter our world. We also consider electricity a public good and we want ubiquitous service to everyone (and nearly have it). But the electric industry also has segments that are not a natural monopoly and you could have many companies compete to provide those services upon the single, regulated grid -- generation, voltage control, metering, and customer service. The only place where this industry is subject to the principal/agent problem (which is how much utility will spend and be compensated for) is scrutinized by a public utility commission. We still have a principal/agent problem where utilities are earning greater returns than their risk profile can really justify. But, it isn't nearly as rapacious as what we see in healthcare. I don't know the healthcare industry nearly so well. But, I feel like there is some promise in taking a similar approach -- certain segments are regulated and a market-based ecosystem of other parts not afflicted with the principal/agent problem is allowed to grow.

France's system is kinda like this. They have a large system of government-regulated healthcare that covers 70% of costs, and then a smaller ecosystem of supplemental insurance and private practice doctors to serve the remaining demand. Most people have the supplemental insurance, but the prices a doctor can charge are anchored by the public sector, so things can't spiral out of hand. If private provision became too expensive, people can drop out of supplemental insurance and rely wholly on the public system.

All this to say, health insurance is the fuel on our fire, but if we want to do something practical to reduce costs, the solution isn't with the health insurance. We need to get some control on the healthcare providers themselves. We are the most innovative healthcare industry in the world, and for those who can afford it, we can provide the best healthcare. But, this isn't sustainable if you want to consider healthcare a public good that should be ubiquitously available to all. We need to innovate less and provide more. If that's our goal, we need to treat it the way we treat utilities.

 

There is plenty of innovation is other countries with Universal Healthcare. Wait times will go up, but that really just tells you people were going without medical treatment before, which I'd rather wait than cut in line just because I have more money.

I had a client, that was the biggest MAGA guy on the planet. Literally goes to the UK for all of his medical treatment. When my stepdad had to go the ER in London, he said it the care was great, but the building wasn't as fancy, and there was no cost to him even as a tourist.

We import so many doctors, and even the ones that were American to begin with go to other countries to get their medical degrees due to not enough medical schools in the US. We aren't special.

Making the switch to universal care would be difficult, because it would be a massive economic shift for one of the biggest industries in this country. Insurance, hospitals, doctors, etc that we have to consider. The most likely scenario is Medicare for All.

And yes, we do need to find any way to bring down the cost, and simply continuing premium tax credits doesn't fix the larger problems, it just shifts the burden. My biggest complaint about the HCA was the lack of cost reduction in it. I believe there needed to be a government option to have any chance to accomplish that goal. Some of my thoughts to cutting costs are increasing what we allow NPs, RNs, and Pharmacies to do (we've made improvements, but more to go). Increase the number of doctors in this country. We need to expand medical schools, training, and eventually subsidize it.

 

Government employee. No wonder you hate regular people.

 

The left wants inexpensive or FREE, high-quality, healthcare, but they also want open borders and for poor and middle-class Americans to pay for housing, education, food, and HEALTHCARE for everybody that comes. The far-left Biden Regime imported 20 million ILLEGAL immigrants to add to the 60 million illegals already here.

How do you reconcile that with wanting affordable healthcare?