Everyone, it seems, is bracing for higher health care costs next year — from local governments to gig workers to federal lawmakers.
Cuyahoga County cited rising health care costs as one of the biggest challenges to balancing its budget over the next two years. The 583,000 Ohioans who buy on the federal marketplace will see plans rise far more steeply than in prior years. And Democrats, on the national level, are staking their votes to reopen the government on efforts to prevent spiking health insurance premiums.
The rising costs are due to a ton of factors that aren’t quite settled yet and depend on what type of insurance you buy.
The majority of Ohio adults under age 65 get their insurance from their employer. There are different estimates for how much that is expected to rise: one national survey found workers are expected to pay 6.5% on average more in 2026. That’s mostly due to economic trends around the cost of health care, said Michael McGough, a policy analyst in KFF’s program on the Affordable Care Act.
“Tariffs, again, are driving up costs for prescription drugs and medical devices that are imported,” McGough said. Increased usage of expensive weight loss assistance drugs like Ozempic is also inflating costs.
But people who buy health insurance on the federal marketplace are expected to get hit with the real double-whammy. Tax credits that help residents pay for insurance from the federal marketplace might expire at the end of the year, if Republicans and Democrats don’t find a way to extend them. Those credits knocked an average of $500 a month off the premiums of Ohio buyers in 2025, according to KFF.
Uncertainty around the future of the tax credits cranked up an already-expensive health care market next year.
“We’re seeing increases that are well above what we’ve been seeing over the last few years, even throughout the pandemic, and this is mostly due to federal policy uncertainty,” McGough said.
Health care premiums for Ohioans who buy on the federal marketplace will rise between 13% and 17% next year, depending on the type of plan, according to data from KFF.
The rising health care costs across the board have experts worried that more people will go without insurance altogether.
“Some people are going to think that it’s just not worth it to have insurance anymore because they just can’t afford to pay the premium,” said Brian O’Rourke, a health care policy analyst at the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.
That’s especially true, he said, as people who have health insurance continue to experience high out-of-pocket medical costs. The Ohio Health Policy Institute found about a quarter of people who bought employer health insurance struggled to pay medical bills in 2023.
“They may feel like even though I have the insurance, I’m still paying large amounts out of pocket,” O’Rourke said. “And so they may choose to go uninsured.”