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Getting the latest healthcare news for you
Getting the latest healthcare news for you
Blaming insurers won't fix your health insurance bill. A new tool from Yale's Health Care Affordability Lab reveals that insurer overhead accounts for just 15% of the average premium in 2024 — down from 19% in 2011. Private insurance premiums have surged 78% since 2011, and the real driver is rising medical costs, not insurer profits.
Health insurers have been a popular political target lately, but a new data tool from Yale's Health Care Affordability Lab suggests that cracking down on insurer overhead alone won't make a meaningful dent in premiums. The tool, first shared with Axios, shows that insurer markups — the portion of premiums kept to cover overhead and profit — actually shrank as a share of premiums, from 19% in 2011 to 15% in 2024.
The bigger story? The underlying cost of medical care is what's really driving premiums up. Premium growth has closely tracked the rise in insurers' spending on medical claims, meaning the root problem lies in healthcare costs themselves — not insurer margins.
By the Numbers:
Why it matters: Targeting insurer overhead might shave a few percentage points off premiums at best. Real affordability reform requires addressing the underlying drivers of healthcare spending — a much harder political and policy challenge.
