Reality Index

Health care · Multi-line item chart

Health care.

Employer-sponsored insurance · annual premiums, worker contributions, deductibles · 1999–2025

Health insurance costs vs. official inflation, 1999–2025
Indexed: 1999 = 100 (deductible series rebased to 2006 = 100) · Five health care cost measures from KFF's annual survey, plus overall CPI-U All Items

Reading the chart. Every health care cost measure ran roughly 2.0–2.4x faster than CPI All Items over the same window. Total premiums (employer + worker share combined) more than quadrupled. Worker contributions — the portion families actually pay out of pocket — also more than quadrupled. And single-coverage deductibles, since BLS started tracking them in 2006, more than tripled while CPI grew only 1.6x. There is no measure of health care cost in this dataset that grew at anywhere near the official inflation rate. The deductible series is rebased to 2006 = 100 since that's when KFF began tracking it; all other series share the 1999 anchor.