There was a time when the American Dream meant buying a home, raising a family, and building a future. Today, an increasing number of Americans are discovering that simply keeping health insurance can cost more than the roof over their heads.
The latest data shows that Affordable Care Act marketplace premiums are soaring into 2026. Insurers are raising premiums by an average of roughly 20% to 26%, depending on the market, marking the largest increases in years. Some estimates suggest that if subsidy programs are not renewed, millions of Americans could see their monthly insurance bills more than double. In some cases, families are now paying more for health insurance than they pay on their mortgage.
The politicians sold Obamacare as the solution. They promised lower costs, more competition, and affordable healthcare. Instead, what we witnessed was the exact opposite. Deductibles exploded, premiums climbed year after year, and the insurance market consolidated into fewer and fewer players. The average American now faces a system where they pay thousands of dollars annually in premiums only to discover they still have to meet deductibles that can run into the many thousands before coverage even begins.
The entire structure was built on the assumption that enough healthy people would enter the system to offset the costs of those requiring expensive treatment. That never worked as advertised. Young and healthy Americans increasingly opted out whenever possible because the costs became absurd. The result has been a shrinking risk pool and rising premiums that feed on themselves. Insurance companies openly admit they are raising rates partly because they expect healthier people to abandon coverage as costs rise.
Government intervention always leads to higher costs. Education became unaffordable after federal student loan programs flooded universities with guaranteed money. Housing prices exploded after decades of government intervention in mortgages and interest rates. Healthcare followed the same path. The government subsidizes demand while simultaneously regulating supply, creating a system where costs simply continue rising regardless of who occupies the White House.
Then the number one reason families fall into bankruptcy is illness. These insurance companies will fight doctors tooth and nail, refusing to cover life saving procedures. One of the most outspoken critics of the modern health insurance system has been Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a Texas-based surgeon who specializes in breast cancer reconstruction. Potter gained national attention after revealing that United Healthcare contacted her during surgery to question whether a cancer patient truly needed an overnight hospital stay. United then threatened Potter for posting a video of the incident on social media, warning her to take it down before they intervened. She took the opposite approach and became a patient advocate.
Potter has argued that physicians now spend countless hours battling prior authorizations, denials, and bureaucratic obstacles rather than treating patients. She has described the system as one where corporations with a fiduciary duty to maximize profits are effectively making medical decisions for patients they have never examined. Her criticism struck a nerve because it confirmed what millions of Americans already suspect: the greatest obstacle to receiving care is often not the illness itself, but navigating an insurance system that has become so complex and profit-driven that even doctors are struggling to work within it.
More than 24 million Americans are enrolled in ACA marketplace plans, with roughly 22 million receiving subsidies. Without government assistance, many could not afford coverage at all. That is the dirty secret. The system increasingly survives not because it became affordable, but because taxpayers are subsidizing costs that continue moving higher every year.
Meanwhile, healthcare spending in the United States now exceeds $5 trillion annually. Every participant in the system demands a larger share of the pie, and the bill is ultimately passed to the consumer. This is part of the broader sovereign debt crisis that our models have warned about for decades. Governments continually create programs that appear affordable in the beginning, only for the true costs to present themselves later.