Employer$33,481
Marketplace$15,927
Universal$9,597
The Whole Bill
Plan year 2027
What changed

What does your healthcare actually cost?

Not the number on your paystub. The whole number.

On your paystub

$8,849

That is what healthcare looks like from where you sit, per year.

Change the household
Your ZIP
Zip
from your ZIP
Household
4
Ages
Household income
$95,000
$12k$260k
How you’re covered now
On TRICARE, Medicare or VA care? This calculator prices employer, marketplace and uninsured households. What is different for yours.
Your plan’s numbers · optional Currently using survey averages. Expand to enter your numbers.
Your premium deduction · optional
Total plan premium, per year · optional
The whole premium: your share plus your employer’s. It is on a W-2 in Box 12, code DD. With this, the employer share stops being a survey average and becomes exactly this minus your yearly deduction. The two fields work together, and they are meant to be different numbers.
Deductible, per year · optional
Roughly what care costs your household in a year before the plan pays: deductible plus copays if you know them. Not the out-of-pocket maximum. Ours is a modeled average; yours is a fact.
Live estimate
Modeled · not a quote
What your household’s healthcare costs, per year
$33,481

Employer premiums: KFF 2026 survey averages. Marketplace: your county’s 2027 rates, priced at each person’s age, and the IRS 2027 applicable-percentage table. Out-of-pocket: a modeled average.

The part you never see

$20,832

Your employer pays this toward your premium. It is part of what you earn, and no paystub shows it.

Why this counts as yours

When your employer “covers” your health insurance, they are not giving you a gift. They are spending part of your compensation on a product, and handing you the product instead of the money.

Economists broadly agree this cost lands on wages. It is yours. It just never appears on a paystub, so almost nobody counts it, which is exactly why healthcare costs feel survivable in the abstract and ruinous in practice.

How premiums have risen

The whole bill

$33,481

Add what you pay at the doctor, and here is the whole bill: what your household’s healthcare costs, per year.

Show the arithmetic

Four things add up to what your household’s healthcare costs. Two of them appear on a paystub. The largest never does; it is spent on your behalf.

The cliff

One dollar, $15,261.

Nothing in this section is modeled. The premium tax credit does not taper at the top. It stops. This is what the statute does to a household that earns one dollar too much.

A dollar under the line
A dollar over it
no credit at all
The difference
for one extra dollar earned

The enhanced credits enacted in 2021 capped contributions at 8.5% of income and flattened this edge entirely. They expired on 31 December 2025. The poverty guidelines and IRS applicable-percentage table behind these figures are on the methodology page.

Same care, universal coverage

$9,597

No premiums. Nothing due at the doctor.

Six published estimates. Pick one.
$9,597$14,936

Who pays the rest

Your family’s care still has to be paid for. What changes is who pays it. Everyone else pays the rest.

Everyone’s share. What Medicare and Medicaid spend today goes into one national plan, and the same taxes apply to every household and employer in the country, rising with income.

Lower prices, in some estimates. The studies disagree on whether the country would spend more or less in total: the Lancet estimate has it spending less, Urban’s about a fifth more. None has the cost disappearing.

One thing here flatters universal coverage: the Medicare tax you pay today would most likely continue, and these figures leave it out. What we know is wrong.

Who produced this estimate
How solid is this figure
Compare side by side
Through your employer
What you pay today
$33,481
On the marketplace
 
$15,927
Under universal coverage
No bill at the point of care
$9,597

Bars show what this household bears: employer money counts on both sides, a taxpayer subsidy on neither. No study published a per-household figure, so the universal numbers are our allocation; the methodology page shows the arithmetic.

Your household would keep
every year
Over a decade
at today’s prices
If you lost your job tomorrow
$28,869
/ year, COBRA
The employer share does not disappear. It moves onto your bill.
Where every model lands
All six estimates, against what you pay now
$0 $9,597 to $14,936 $33,481  today

Now use it

Send it.

Your letter is already written, with your number in it.

Figures are per year and follow your household. Employer premiums are survey averages; marketplace premiums are your county’s 2027 rates. How every figure is sourced.

The other number

Cost is not the only thing being measured.

114,174
deaths a year prevented by moving to universal healthcare
Projected by the Yale School of Public Health · July 2026
What the number is made of

Nearly half of the coverage-related deaths prevented, 29,631 of them, would be among people who already have insurance.

Made up of
62,863 from extending coverage to people who have none + 51,311 from reversing the coverage policies enacted since 2025

The second of those is the policy change at the top of this page. Five million people losing coverage is not only a budget line.

The underinsured: households with coverage on paper and deductibles they cannot clear. That is the argument this whole site makes, counted in a different unit. Having a plan is not the same as being able to use it.

Who produced this number A preprint from July 2026, not peer reviewed, and its senior author advised Sen. Sanders’ office.

The preprint has not been peer reviewed. Its senior author served as an unpaid adviser to Sen. Sanders’ office while the Medicare for All legislation was drafted, and has testified in support of it. We say that for the same reason we tell you the Mercatus study was Koch-funded: you should know who produced a number before you weigh it.

It also shares an assumption with the cost figures above: that provider payments fall to Medicare rates. Blahous called that assumption “relatively generous” and rejected the savings it produces; this study builds on it. The two are not independent confirmations of each other. They are the same bet, framed in opposite directions.

Pandey, Wells, Ye, Fitzpatrick & Galvani, Projected economic gains and lives saved under universal healthcare in the United States, Yale School of Public Health, 2026. The same team’s 2020 Lancet paper, which was peer reviewed, put the figure at roughly 68,000 lives and $450 billion.

The other side

The objections, taken seriously.

01“My taxes would go through the roof.”

Taxes rise, and the premium line goes to zero at the same time. What matters is the total.

Yes. Your taxes would rise, and every honest model says so, the ones above included. The question is whether the total shrinks, because the premium line goes to zero at the same time. For this household the tax increase runs $9,597 to $14,936 depending on whose model you pick, against $32,103 in premiums, deductibles and copays it replaces.*

*For a household like yours, 1 of the 6 models starts costing more than today at about $248,000 of income, and the other 5 do not at any income the slider reaches. If that is you, the calculator will say so.

02“I’d be stuck waiting months for care.”

Some universal systems have long waits and some do not. The US already rations care, by price.

Wait times are real in some universal systems and not in others. Canada’s elective queues are long; Germany’s multi-payer sickness funds and France’s statutory system cover everyone without them. How a system is designed and paid for matters more than whether it is single-payer, a distinction the debate usually flattens.*

*The US already rations by price. KFF’s surveys have repeatedly found around four in ten adults saying they or a family member delayed or skipped care because of cost. That is a waiting list too. It is just invisible.

03“I’d lose the doctor I have now.”

Narrow networks and job changes already decide that for most people.

Worth checking against what you have today. Narrow networks already decide this for most people: your plan drops a hospital system, your employer switches carriers, you change jobs. A single national network is the version where your doctor does not depend on your employer’s procurement decisions.*

*Transition is disruptive, and providers who do well under commercial rates would be paid less.

04“The country simply cannot afford it.”

It replaces spending that is already happening. The comparison is with today, not with zero.

The headline figure is enormous: on the order of $30 to $40 trillion over a decade. But it replaces spending already happening: premiums, employer contributions, out-of-pocket costs, Medicaid, Medicare. The comparison that matters is against the status quo, not against zero.*

*The Mercatus study is the useful one here. Funded by opponents of the policy, it still showed lower national spending than the status quo. But that result depends on the bill’s own assumption that providers are paid Medicare rates, a reading Blahous himself rejects. Both halves of that are true.

05“Government-run coverage cannot work here.”

It already does, for about a third of the country.

It already does, for about a third of the country. Medicare covers 69.7 million people. The Military Health System covers 9.4 million service members, families and retirees through TRICARE, at about $6,800 a person a year, with no enrollment fee for active-duty families and a yearly cap on what any family pays. The VA treats 9.1 million enrolled veterans. Nobody in this debate proposes taking any of it away. The question is whether the rest of the country joins a version of it, not whether such a thing can exist here.*

*TRICARE is not free: retirees pay $375 to $1,191 a year in enrollment fees, with cost shares up to a cap of $3,000 to $4,635 by plan and group, and the $64 billion budget includes military hospitals and medical readiness, so the per-person figure is a budget divided by a headcount, not a premium. Figures and sources are on the methodology page.

Read the full methodology →
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