Bloomberg stops covering health insurance in the latest sign of rising care costs

This week, I’m thinking about the broader issues in healthcare: how much it costs.

Bloomberg, a massive media organization famous for being flush with cash, says employees will now have to pay their health care premiums. One of the big perks of working at Bloomberg has been the fully-paid health benefits. This is not a canary in the coal mine of health care being too expensive. It is merely one in a mountain of dead canaries. But it does seem to indicate a point of no return.    

There are other signals this week: More employers are moving away from traditional health insurance to health reimbursement arrangements, a structure in which companies offer employees a stipend to pay for their own individual insurance. 

As more costs shift to employees, hospitals are pushing patients to pay upfront for services in the face of dwindling insurance enrollment, higher deductibles, and more out-of-pocket costs. As a result, Americans are avoiding care or turning to AI to manage it.

What does any of this have to do with the health tech industry? 

Startup founders and people innovating inside of traditional health care are all thinking about who will pay for their platforms and technologies. Will it be payers? Will it be health systems? But if patients cannot afford to get cared for, then no one gets paid.  

People will turn to AI, yes. But AI that’s free or low-cost. Some readers scoffed when in a piece about Claude being hacked to deliver unauthorized medical care, I highlighted how the AI delivered a medication taper because, they said, this isn’t a real use case. But as people stop being able to afford care and medications, this will increasingly become a tool they turn to—one that is not vetted, even if medication tapering is fairly straightforward. 

I talked to someone this week who used it for this express purpose. They had to use Claude to taper their medication, because they could not afford the $400 visit with their prescriber and they needed a prescription renewal. So instead, they asked Claude to taper them off. If you thought medication adherence was bad before, just wait. No AI chatbot is going to fix that. 

The cost of health care doesn’t just affect patients; it affects the whole system. 

Now onto the news… 

— Ruth 

Episode 3 of Rounds is here!

Co-hosted by Christina Farr and Stephanie Davis, this episode digs into what's really driving digital health right now — mega deals, market concentration, and what's building durable advantage as AI becomes table stakes. Megan Zweig, CEO and President of Rock Health Advisory, joins to break down Rock Health's H1 2026 funding and market report, and Arvind Kadaba, CFO of Aidoc, sits down to talk about fundraising, market forces, and what sets a clinical AI company apart.