How much your healthcare costs in all 50 states
- Healthcare is costly - but costs also vary tremendously based on where you live.
- Workers in some states paid potentially as little as $4,700 for healthcare in 2017, while costs in several other states topped $8,000, a report from The Commonwealth Fund found.
- Read on for the 10 most expensive states.
Healthcare in the US is expensive, and the cost is increasing faster than wages are growing.
A report from The Commonwealth Fund paints a picture of just how expensive. It also shows how much costs vary based on where you live.
In 2017, healthcare cost as little as $4,700 in Hawaii or $5,500 in Michigan, for example. Meanwhile, costs were much higher in other states, and several topped $8,000.
The report looked specifically at how much workers could be paying for health insurance coverage and for out-of-pocket costs like medical procedures and prescription drugs.
Researchers Sara Collins and David Radley did this by adding each state's average premiums, or monthly health insurance fees, with average deductibles, or the amount people may pay for health services before their health insurer starts picking up the tab.
People in the US get health coverage in a variety of ways. This report looked at those who get health insurance through a plan from an employer, which about 50% of people in the US do. Government programs like Medicaid and Medicare are other big sources of health coverage in the country.
The study's researchers concluded that middle-income families are getting squeezed by rising health costs and stagnating incomes. And though the study didn't look at lower-income families, they're affected too, they said.
"People across the United States are not experiencing health care costs equally," the researchers wrote.
The report relied on data from the "most comprehensive national survey of U.S. employer health plans," the federal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component (MEPS-IC), which reached out to more than 40,000 businesses in 2017, and had about 66% respond overall.
Here are the 10 most expensive states: