What does your healthcare actually cost?
Not the number on your paystub. The whole number, including the share your employer pays on your behalf, which is your money too.
You see about a quarter of it.
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.
All figures are per year unless labeled otherwise, and follow the household you set below. Employer premiums are survey averages; benchmark premiums come from the CMS 2026 plan files for your county.
Sources: KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey; CMS; Census Bureau.
Your plan’s numbers · optional Currently using survey averages. Expand to enter your numbers.
Employer premiums are KFF 2025 survey averages. Subsidy math follows the IRS 2026 applicable-percentage table exactly. The benchmark premium is your county’s second-lowest-cost silver plan from the CMS 2026 plan files, priced at each person’s age on your state’s own curve. Out-of-pocket spend is still a modeled average.
Here is the whole bill.
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.
One dollar, $12,980.
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.
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.
Nothing caps a bad year.
The out-of-pocket maximum is the law’s ceiling on a bad year, for people with coverage. Going without insurance means going without the ceiling: no statute anywhere limits what a hospital can bill you.
How often does cost stop care? Asked by KFF in 2025, three in four uninsured adults said they skipped or postponed care over cost; the federal NHIS survey, asking more narrowly, puts it at 38.6%, more than double the privately insured. Both figures, and the list-price arithmetic above (our derivation from HCUP’s published aggregates and published markup research, one of whose sources is union-funded and labeled so), are on the methodology page, along with the medical-bankruptcy literature, where the famous numbers disagree and we print both sides or neither.
Another way to pay for the same care.
Nobody agrees on what single-payer would cost. So pick whose estimate you trust, including the one funded by its opponents.
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.
Cost is not the only thing being measured.
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 objections, taken seriously.
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 $9,637 to $14,976 depending on whose model you pick, against $30,793 in premiums, deductibles and copays it replaces.*
*For a household like yours, 1 of the 6 models starts costing more than today at about $238,000 of income, and the other 5 do not at any income the slider reaches. If that is you, the calculator will say so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every figure here traces to a published source, listed on the methodology page. Disagree with an assumption? Change it and watch the numbers move.
Read the full methodology →Send them your number.
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