The Other Affordability Crisis: Health Care – Inside Sources

Housing costs are too high, no doubt about it, and elected leaders are right to focus on making them more affordable.

But as bad as housing costs are, health care costs are worse. In fact, the average monthly health insurance premium for a family is now higher than the average mortgage. And it’s American families who are looking for relief.

According to Gallup, American adults’ ability to afford health care is at a five-year low. In 2025, when the average mortgage payment was $2,030 a month, the average family health insurance premium from employer-sponsored coverage hit $2,249 a month.

That fact alone should set off alarm bells in Washington, D.C.

It’s true that for most Americans, their employers pay about $1,600 of that cost each month. But that’s still very high. It’s a business expense that discourages job creation and — perhaps most important — it’s money the company could be paying its employees, increasing take-home pay for families facing higher prices at the gas station and grocery store.

How did we get here? As usual, with good intentions and bad policy.

The Obamacare-era “reforms” pushed by the Democratic Party would, we were assured, lower the cost of insurance premiums. Instead, the law incentivized consolidation and vertical integration among health insurance companies, leading to giant health conglomerates that are now monopolizing patients’ checkbooks.

Take UnitedHealth Group. The company acquired or created more than 250 subsidiaries in 2024 alone, including pharmacies and physician management companies that extend far beyond its traditional health insurance business. This has spiraled into full-blown vertical integration, with the company reaching nearly 2,700 subsidiaries.

While its stock has returned more than 100,000% to investors over the years, its premiums have gone up more than 20%. Great for shareholders, great for the boardroom, not so great for hardworking families trying to pay their bills.

UnitedHealth is not the only player benefiting from this broken system. Centene recently reported $1 billion in profit during the second quarter of 2026, as well as premium and service revenues rising 4% to $44.4 billion from $42.5 billion in the year-ago period, stating that “the increase was primarily driven by premium yield.”

Kaiser Permanente ended 2025 with operating revenues up 10.3% and more than $9.3 billion in total gains while raising premiums by upwards of 8%. The pattern is impossible to ignore. While families struggle to afford coverage, the largest insurers keep finding new ways to grow revenue, consolidate control and shift costs onto patients.

This is how market power causes financial pain for Americans seeking treatment. Big insurers draft the rules (the health insurance lobby literally helped write Obamacare), set the prices and corral customers into their control. Helpless patients are left to foot the bill for corporate greed.

The same companies deciding whether a patient’s medicine is covered now increasingly own the middlemen negotiating rebates, the pharmacies filling prescriptions and the physician groups directing care. Families are told higher bills are unavoidable, but insurers have built a system where they collect at every checkpoint, and accountability disappears behind layers of subsidiaries and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), all owned by those same insurance conglomerates.

It’s about to get even worse. Big insurers that offer plans through Obamacare’s marketplaces are proposing a median premium increase of 15% for 2027, according to the latest analysis from the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. If those increases are finalized, families could see typical premiums climb by more than a third over two years.

It’s a gold mine for big insurance, but a drag on the wages of American families.

The Trump administration has made cracking down on wasteful health care spending a top priority. The administration’s 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown recently led to charges against 455 individuals in cases involving more than $6.5 billion in alleged health care fraud. The Department of Justice says the cases involved false claims and alleged fraud schemes across 56 federal districts and 45 states and territories. The Department of Justice’s announcement

The administration can build on this momentum by examining how health insurers have gotten so big and why they aren’t doing more to make coverage more affordable.

This administration has an opportunity to deliver better access to the care Americans need at a price they can actually afford. That starts with investigating insurer gamesmanship, hidden middlemen and corporate schemes that put profits ahead of patients.

The American people deserve accountability and a health care system that serves patients and families — not the insurance giants that have spent years rigging the rules in their own favor.