Press Release: 5/22/2025
Budget Busting Health Insurance Increases
For Immediate Release
Contact: Kimberley Connors, Executive Director, Mass-Care, 617-297-8011, director@masscare.org
Mass-Care has issued the following statement:
Increased health insurance premiums in 2025 are budget busters. The reality of health insurance premiums in Massachusetts is that they are rising an average of 10%, a higher rate of increase than in prior years. However, some towns and other organizations will see higher increases, like in Greenfield, where the increase will be 14%.
It’s the season for town meetings and city council meetings where annual budgets are approved, and these must now cover these increased health insurance costs.
These increases will affect all full time local government employees, such as teachers, as well as those in all other institutions and businesses. For example, school committees requesting funding for education-related improvements likely will instead have to use those funds to cover the higher health insurance costs for school employees. Higher health insurance costs will also be busting the budgets of the individuals and families who have private health insurance plans whether through their employers or on the health insurance marketplace.
Meanwhile private insurance companies will continue to pay their executives outrageous salaries and earn great corporate profits. Private health insurance executives are paid multi-million dollar salaries that are almost 400 times their average employees’ salaries.
They achieve this by “managing” care, which includes requiring preauthorization for care, monitoring the provision of care by health care professionals, denying coverage for treatments recommended by physicians, imposing burdensome appeal processes to get needed care authorized and paid for, and restricting the number of health professionals they will reimburse for care.
Deductibles and copays continue to increase, making private health insurance more costly for individuals and families. In addition, Black and Hispanic residents are already finding health insurance coverage harder to afford than their white counterparts.
The cost for private health insurance is unsustainable for employers and employees.
An Act Establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts (House Bill 1405 and Senate Bill 860) creates the Massachusetts Health Care Trust as the Single Payer of the health care costs of Massachusetts residents. It would save employers, employees, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts billions of dollars annually. The 7.5% to 8% tax on employers and the 2.5% tax on what employees make (after $20,000 in both cases) would be far less than private insurance plans cost.
Tax money plus Medicare and Medicaid spending would be paid into the Massachusetts Health Care Trust to reimburse professionals for the care they provide. Reimbursement for care would be raised.
All care provided by a licensed professional would be free at the point of service. Deductibles and copays would be eliminated, and people will be able to get their care from any licensed health professional that they choose (no worrying about whether the professional takes your insurance). There would be no need for costly Medicare Advantage plans, which are offered by private health insurance companies.
Mass-Care has on-line calculators for estimating how much cities and towns (https://masscare.org/muni-calc/) and businesses (https://masscare.org/business-calculators/) would save if Medicare for All were enacted. To illustrate, the city of Provincetown would save over $2 million annually. Our latest economic analysis (https://masscare.org/economic-analysis/) estimates the total savings at over $37 billion a year (about 30% of current spending).
In addition, non-binding referendums supporting Massachusetts Medicare for All have passed in every legislative district where they were on the ballot, often by very large margins. Massachusetts voters support Medicare for All.
Mass-Care, the coalition supporting Medicare for All in Massachusetts, is holding a statewide conference about Medicare for All on Saturday, June 21, at Clark University in Worcester. Most of the day will be spent in working groups of businesses, municipalities, unions, health care professionals, and community organizers to develop additional strategies and tactics for getting Medicare for All in Massachusetts enacted.
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Mass-Care’s mission is to establish a Single Payer health care system in Massachusetts so that all residents of the Commonwealth will have access to comprehensive, quality, and equitable health care, publicly financed and free of out-of-pocket cost at point-of-care, with free choice of practitioners, because it is basic to life and human dignity. The Mass-Care Coalition is now over 100 organizations.
www.masscare.org / 617-297-8011 / info@masscare.org