Long gone are the days when families automatically choose to renew their health insurance policies each year. Today, double-digit rate spikes, made worse by a lack of medical price transparency, are driving policyholders who once may have stuck with their current plans to seek out more affordable alternatives.
As we begin open enrollment, Americans should know that they can access the high-quality medical treatment they need to thrive from youth to old age despite dramatically rising healthcare costs.
Employees in the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) plan are projected to pay an average of 13.5% more for their plans in 2025 – that's the largest healthcare premium increase in more than a decade. This large jump comes on the heels of a 7.7% jump in 2024 and an 8.7% increase in 2023, according to the Office of Personnel Management. These rate increases are unsustainable for anyone, but especially for families and individuals already struggling to afford life’s other necessities, including food, transportation, and education.
FEHB enrollees are far from the only ones to experience skyrocketing healthcare costs. For the third consecutive year, employers across the nation will pay over 5% more for healthcare costs -- even up to 9% if they do not take swift steps to manage these costs.
Unfortunately, the trend towards costly care is exacerbated by countless hospitals across the nation which refuse to post prices for essential treatment on their websites. They even fail to do so despite longstanding federal laws requiring it. In fact, only 34.5% of hospitals comply with federal price transparency rules, requiring hospitals to post the cash prices and rates negotiated with health insurers as well as estimates for at least 300 services so consumers can compare prices.
As a result, Americans who are admitted to the emergency room or appear for routine checkups have no idea what they will be charged until they receive a bill in the mail days after their appointments. This leaves little to no room for middle class families to budget for their healthcare. Even at the same hospital, an MRI can cost $300 or $3,000, depending on which department patients go to receive it. The problem is so prevalent that 9 out of 10 Americans want their health insurance companies to provide “real, actual prices – not estimates.”
These costs are all the more tragic considering that the United States is falling far behind other countries in its ability to provide basic care to the most vulnerable. This fact was recently revealed in a study by the Commonwealth Fund, whose president, Dr. Joseph Betancourt, observes that “the U.S. spends more on health care than any other country and Americans are sicker, die younger and struggle to afford essential health care.” This trend must end.
It is important to know that health sharing ministries, unlike traditional insurance, are uniquely positioned to bring much-needed transparency and lower prices to our broken healthcare system. Solidarity HealthShare, the ministry I founded in 2016, does precisely this by negotiating medical bills on its members' behalf and securing the highest quality care for them at fair and reasonable prices. In this way, we save members millions of dollars per year in shared expenses, and it is why healthcare is so much more affordable for our members than traditional health insurance.
Rising healthcare costs are being driven in large part by a system suffering from a near total lack of transparency. What we have seen is that creative solutions like health sharing allow members to access the highest quality care at reasonable costs by insisting on more transparency and less waste. And that is something all Americans can get behind.
Chris Faddis is president of Solidarity HealthShare, a health care sharing ministry guided by the moral teachings of the Catholic Church that negotiates directly with providers to ensure delivery of high-quality and affordable, life-affirming health care for the more than 46,000 members it has served since 2016.
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