The Affordability Election Is Already Repricing Your Brand
JULY 2026
The Affordability Election Is Already Repricing Your Brand
The Signal
Everyone in healthcare is watching November.
The boards I work with want to know what the midterms will do to policy, to Medicaid, to the marketplace. Fair questions. But I think we are watching the wrong thing.
The election hasn't happened yet, and it is already changing how people see us.
According to KFF's latest Health Tracking Poll (April 2026), nearly two-thirds of adults are worried about being able to afford healthcare, and three in ten say they are "very worried" about paying for it. An Axios-Ipsos poll (April 2026) released in June found that 72% of Americans are worried about their insurance costs rising this year, and about one in four say they are likely to go looking for a new health plan because of it.
That is not a forecast. That is the mood your patients are already in when they walk through your door.
The Shift
FFrom "wait and see what the election does" to "the sentiment is already the verdict."
Here is what I keep trying to get leadership teams to sit with. The policy outcome is months away. The judgment is not.
Right now, while the campaign ads run and the affordability story dominates the news, patients and employers are quietly sorting health systems into two piles. The ones that feel like part of the cost problem, and the ones that feel like they are on the patient's side of it.
By the time the votes are counted, that sorting will mostly be done. As KFF's Ashley Kirzinger put it, healthcare affordability is intrinsically tied to the economy now, and people are asking themselves whether they can even afford to get sick.
When someone is asking that question, your brand is not your tagline or your billboard. It is their last billing statement. It is whether your prices were easy to find. It is whether your call center treated a cost question like a fair thing to ask.
You don't get to answer that after November. You are answering it today, whether you mean to or not.
The Move
Get ahead of the verdict before it hardens.
A few things worth doing now, not in Q4:
Read your own statements like a worried patient would. Pull a stack of real bills and explanation-of-benefits letters. If you can't understand them in thirty seconds, neither can the family at the kitchen table deciding whether to come back.
Make your prices findable and your estimates honest. Price transparency has stopped being a compliance chore and started being a trust signal. Treat it like marketing because that is what it has quietly become.
Train the front line to treat cost questions as care. The moment someone asks "what will this cost me" is a moment of truth. A shrug loses them. A straight answer keeps them.
Decide what you want to be known for, then say it plainly. If affordability and access are real strengths for you, claim them now, while people are listening for exactly that.
None of this requires waiting on Washington. All of it requires deciding you would rather shape the verdict than receive it.
SPIRTO Insight: Most systems are treating the election as an event. It isn't. The event is the conversation already happening at every kitchen table in your market–the one where people decide whether healthcare is something done with them or to them.
Policy will follow that conversation. Your volumes already are. The election is just the day everyone finally says out loud what they have been feeling for months.
You can't campaign your way out of a reputation. You can only earn a better one, starting before the polls open.
Closing Thought
If healthcare affordability is the issue of this election, then the real question for a CEO isn't "How will the results affect us?"
It's this:
"When our patients think about who is on their side on cost, are we on the list? And would they know it without us telling them?"
By Paula Serios
Chief Executive Officer, SPIRTO Healthcare Growth Consultancy
If this is something you’re seeing, you’re not alone.
We’ve been helping teams step back and quickly spot where growth and value are out of sync—and what to do about it.
Happy to compare notes in a quick 15-minute SPIRTO Introductory Session.