Billionaires are not the reason you can’t afford healthcare. Obamacare didn’t fix the cost problem either.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to make health insurance more affordable.

Look at what happened to the people buying coverage themselves.

In 2026, the average ACA Marketplace deductible jumped 37% to $3,786, an increase of $1,027 in one year. Average premium payments rose 58%, from $113 to $178 a month, after the enhanced subsidies expired. KFF estimates average effectuated Marketplace enrollment could fall from 22.3 million in 2025 to roughly 17.5 million in 2026.

And this isn’t just a Marketplace problem.

Employer family health insurance averaged $26,993 in 2025. Workers themselves paid an average $6,850 of that. The average single-coverage deductible reached $1,886, up 43% from a decade earlier.

Meanwhile, Americans spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024.

Private health insurance spending alone was $1.64 trillion.

Hospitals took $1.63 trillion.

Physician and clinical services took another $1.11 trillion.

Americans still paid $557 billion directly out of pocket.

So where is all that money going?

One 2026 Health Affairs study estimated that commercial health insurance administration alone ran at a median of $599 per person per year in fully insured markets, compared with $285 for self-funded coverage. The study estimated that bringing above-median administrative spending and profits down to the median could save billions.

Hospitals also spent an estimated $43 billion in 2025 dealing with insurer claims denials, prior authorization and payment collection.

That’s the part of the healthcare debate that gets buried under the billionaire argument.

The U.S. doesn’t have a shortage of money going into healthcare.

It has a $5.3 trillion healthcare system that keeps getting more expensive.

And Obamacare’s biggest promise was not to make hospitals, drugs, doctors and insurance administration cheap.

It built a larger subsidized insurance market around an already expensive healthcare system.

You can defend that tradeoff.

You can argue that millions of people gained coverage and protections they didn’t have before.

But don’t confuse having insurance with having affordable healthcare.

If your insurance costs hundreds of dollars a month and you still have a $3,786 deductible, you haven’t escaped the cost problem.

You’ve just moved more of the cost into the insurance system.

And blaming every healthcare bill on billionaires doesn’t explain where the $5.3 trillion actually goes.

That’s the question worth asking.