Insurance expert Mel Duvall is an award-winning business journalist with a background in covering insurance, banking and personal finance. His work has appeared in leading publications such as The Financial Post, American Banker and Baseline Magazine.
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If you’re looking for a health insurer that provides customer satisfaction and is easy to work with, then look no further than Kaiser Permanente.
Kaiser Permanente ranked No. 1 overall (tied with UnitedHealthcare) in Insure.com’s list of the Best Health Insurance Companies for 2025 with a star rating of 4.17 out of 5 stars.
Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plans, was a top performer in a number of areas in our health insurance customer survey, including affordability. The company also received the highest National Committee for Quality Assurance ranking – 4.20 out of 5 stars – of the top companies in our ranking. NCQA evaluates healthcare plans on, among other things, member satisfaction.
It also received a solid complaint index score from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a 0.37. The NAIC ranks insurers by the number of customer complaints they receive. A market average is 1.0, and anything less indicates the carrier receives fewer complaints than typical for a company its size.
AM Best's Financial Strength Rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's financial strength and ability to meet its ongoing insurance policy and contract obligations.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. It’s based on third-party metrics and our in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
In addition to being highly satisfied with the service and online experience provided by Kaiser Permanente, customers like its pricing. Among the top health insurance providers, it ranked third for price and affordability, receiving 4.19 out of 5 stars.
Below is a look at how Kaiser Permanente’s HMO rates in Georgia compare with Elevance and Aetna. These are 2025 healthcare exchange rates for a single, 40-year-old male in excellent health with an annual income of $70,000.
Kaiser Permanente knows how to make its customers happy. Of the companies we looked at, the insurer had good scores for customer satisfaction. It also ranked well in J.D. Power’s 2024 U.S. Commercial Member Health Plan Study. In California, it had the highest score among the insurers we looked at.
Our survey found that nearly 79% of respondents are happy with the policy offerings from Kaiser Permanente. In this category, however, Kaiser Permanente received a score that placed it in the second half of the companies we reviewed. The winner was Molina.
An overwhelming majority of Kaiser Permanente customers would recommend it to others. However, Highmark topped this category, with all of its customers saying they would tell other people about it.
Most health insurance customers say they trust their insurer. Almost three out of four Kaiser Permanente said they found the company trustworthy, although a number of other insurers did better in this category
High customer satisfaction often translates into strong loyalty. Almost 75% of Kaiser Permanente customers say they plan to renew their insurance. Molina won in this category.
Kaiser Permanente, which has been offering telehealth since before the Covid-19 pandemic, had one of the highest scores of the companies we ranked in this category. Molina and Elevance are the only insurers that scored higher for digital experience.
About 77% of customers said they were satisfied with Kaiser Permanente’s deductibles. A deductible is the amount of money you have to pay out-of-pocket for health care services before your health insurance plan begins to pay. Molina earned the highest score in this category, followed by Humana and Elevance.
A healthcare provider network is a group of doctors, specialists and hospitals that provide services to insured members at a lower cost than providers outside the network. A strong provider network can be a key consideration when shopping for a health plan.
Almost 80% of Kaiser Permanente customers rated the company highly in this category, which puts it in the middle of the insurers in our study. Elevance had the best rating for its provider network.
In 1945, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser partnered with founding physician Sidney R. Garfield, MD, to open a system of prepaid care to the public in Northern California. Unions viewed the plan as labor-friendly and affordable and formed a large membership base in the formative years.
In 1950, Kaiser started the Kaiser Foundation School of Nursing to help fill a nursing shortage following World War II and in 1956 Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. was established as an independent nonprofit California corporation.
Kaiser established the Kaiser Foundation Harbor Hospital in 1957, the first hospital in the country built for members of an employer-sponsored health care plan. It initially provided care to International Longshore and Warehouse Union employees and their families.
In 1976, as healthcare was changing, Kaiser Permanente’s demonstrated affordability was specifically acknowledged as they were recognized as the best health plan model for the groundbreaking Health Maintenance Organization Act, signed into law in December 1973. Kaiser had turned all of their health plans into qualified HMOs by 1976.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Kaiser dramatically increased its telehealth system. Virtual care visits rose from about 15% of all visits to about 80%, including more than 30,000 a day via video.
Kaiser Permanente is one of the nation’s leading health care providers and not-for-profit health plans, serving 12.6 million members in 8 states and the District of Columbia. Kaiser Permanente operates 40 hospitals, 618 medical offices and has almost 24,000 physicians and more than 68,000 nurses. The company had annual operating revenue of $100.8 billion at the end of 2023.
Sources:
Kaiser Permanente “Kaiser Permanente” Accessed March 2025.
Insure.com in the fall of 2024 surveyed more than 1,750 insurance consumers (almost 1,500 of which had health insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR.
Respondents were asked to name their health insurer and then grade it in a number of categories, including:
The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
We then asked respondents to provide a yes or no response to indicate their agreement with the following statements:
The percentage of respondents who said yes is presented in the results.
The editors compiled the survey results and then selected – based on the number of survey responses – the top companies for further evaluation.
We then collected data from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), which evaluates and rates health plans, and National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ complaint data, which ranks a company by the number of customer complaints it receives. The Insure.com team identified the NAIC codes of each underwriting company for each carrier and calculated a weighted average complaint index, weighted by the annual written premium. The associated NAIC complaint index score was used in the calculations.
With the help of Prof. David Marlett, Ph.D., Managing Director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University, the editors created a rating system to determine which insurance companies were best in each sector. For life insurers, we took the following and gave each a weight.
Each insurer was awarded between half a star and 5 stars. No company in the ranking received less than half a star in any category, and 5 stars was the most any insurer could receive.