KFF Health News reported: This year, KFF Health News has chronicled how rising healthcare costs are upending the lives of Americans. Reporters have heard from more than 130 people across the U.S. who are trying to afford their premiums, copayments, prescriptions, and medical bills even as housing, energy, and food costs swell. People told us they are forgoing health insurance coverage, rationing their medications, cutting back on doctor visits, and putting off health procedures.

“We’re not talking about the uninsured or those who are low-income who are struggling now,” said Rebecca Kirch, executive vice president at the National Patient Advocate Foundation. “Now it’s become an all-of-us issue.”

While healthcare costs have largely grown faster than the overall economy for decades, they’ve escalated at a dizzying pace recently. In 2023 and 2024, health spending hit its highest growth rates in two decades excluding 2020’s covid-fueled surge.

The prices that hospitals, doctors, and other clinicians charge have increased, along with how much care people are getting. Overall health spending hit nearly $5.3 trillion in 2024, up from $3 trillion a decade earlier, according to federal data.

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