In 2025 nearly half of working age adults nationwide struggled to afford healthcare. And while uninsured adults were most likely to struggle, even families with coverage were challenged by high costs and medical debt.
The “One Nation, Overcharged” movement involves 140 organizations for healthcare advocacy, civil rights and racial equity from across the state and nation to demand healthcare reform and make it impossible to ignore for both our state and federal leaders, said Laura Colbert, executive director of Georgians for a Healthy Future.
Georgia has twice as much medical debt as the rest of the country, she said. From 2025 to 2026, Georgians who bought their own health insurance through Georgia Access saw their premium costs rise by 114% on average.
“So, we’re seeing people have to choose between having health insurance and maintaining the rest of their household budgets,” Colbert said. “We’ve seen folks make that difficult decision and have to drop coverage.”
Corporations and their interests often outweigh the interests of patients and consumers in the healthcare and health coverage systems, and that shouldn’t be the way it works, Colbert said.
The premium increases that folks are seeing are a result of Congress not renewing premium subsidies enhanced during the pandemic. On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed HR 1, the Reconciliation Bill (aka the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) into law, which includes significant policy changes to Medicaid and the Health Insurance Marketplaces.
Over the next five to 10 years, HR 1 will result in Georgia drawing down or losing more than $5 billion in Medicaid funding, and the state has already seen some fallout from that, Colbert said.
“That’s not an amount the state can make up on its own, and so cuts will have to happen elsewhere,” she said.
Credit: One Nation Overcharged
Americans are having all kinds of problems with the affordability of healthcare and the problems are not limited to people who are uninsured, according to new research from the nonprofit Urban Institute.
Researchers examined difficulties affording healthcare among families of adults ages 18 to 64 using December 2025 data from the Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey, a nationally representative survey of more than 10,000 adults.
Healthcare is expected to become less affordable for working families in the coming years with the implementation of federally mandated Medicaid and Marketplace policies that are projected to add millions to the ranks of the uninsured, Senior Policy Officer Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Katherine Hempstead said.
Between 5 million to 10 million people will lose their Medicaid coverage as a result of work requirements and the increased eligibility redetermination. The Milliman Medical Index, which is an annual estimate of how much like a typical employer-sponsored health plan costs for a family family of four, increased to $37,824 for an average family of four.
“That cost is shared between employers and employees, but that’s the biggest increase in a decade,” Hempstead said. “It’s 7.9% higher than last year. So even people with employer sponsored insurance are paying more than they ever have before.”
Because Georgia didn’t expand Medicaid, there’s a set of people who are too poor to qualify for the individual market but not poor enough to qualify from Medicaid in Georgia, Hempstead said. “And so they actually have absolutely nothing.”
The “One Nation, Overcharged” campaign will bring panels and social events to Atlanta, Savannah and other parts of Georgia this summer.
