5 takeaways from STAT’s series on the soaring cost of health insurance
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- STAT's investigation into employer-sponsored health insurance, which covers more than 150 million Americans, documents why job-based coverage is becoming unaffordable for workers and families across the country.
- Small businesses (200 or fewer workers) offering health insurance have fallen below 60% — an all-time low — with costs pushing firms toward watered-down plans or dropping coverage entirely, making retention harder.
- Small-firm deductibles run more than 50% higher than those at larger companies, and insurers can impose surprise surcharges if the number of workers enrolling increases too much, compounding the cost burden.
- Employer and worker premium contributions jumped from $132.5 billion in 1987 to more than $1.4 trillion in 2024 — nearly four times the $365 billion they'd total if they'd tracked inflation, even after adjusting for average annual payrolls.
- The ACA marketplace is absorbing the fallout: half of marketplace enrollees are now small-business workers or self-employed, up from roughly 28% in 2022, with costs climbing after Congress let enhanced subsidies expire.
- Chris Deacon, a former overseer of New Jersey's state worker health plan turned whistleblower, has become one of America's most influential health care critics after being cut out of a major settlement over the insurer overpayments she exposed.
Why it matters: With 150 million Americans on employer coverage, premiums that have grown nearly 4x faster than inflation since 1987 translate into lower take-home pay, fewer small firms offering insurance (under 60% now do), and a growing exodus — half of ACA marketplace enrollees now work at small firms — to plans where enhanced federal subsidies have already expired, raising costs further for those workers.
