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%.
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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 increasi …