He's quoting what sounds like a market small-group PPO normal-deductible rate for family coverage in the US.
You can get the rates down by opting for an HSA-qualified HDHP plan (the deductibles for those plans in IL are in the range of $5k/$10k-family). I'm not sure how much lower the rate is, but normal-deductible insurance is not a good deal for most people.
If his founders met at a cancer remission support group --- or, for that matter, the support group for any of a list of hundreds of self-evidently nonfatal medical conditions, most of them affecting women --- he would not be able to get insurance at any price. At any price. He would not get "dicked over with worse rates"; he simply would be unable to set up small-group health insurance for that group at all, under any circumstances, unless he excluded members of his group (or fired them). People with those conditions, which (it should not surprise you) are very common, and which very rarely implicate expensive treatment demands down the road†, can obtain insurance only by accepting jobs at companies with large group health plans.
It is sad for me to have to call this comment out for being naive, because is naive in the face of a terrible injustice that also happens to be a thorn in the corneas of many startup founders, but it's naive.
I know several very smart startup founders that have families who are opposed to guaranteed-issue health insurance, but I cannot personally for the life of me fathom how they arrived at that opinion, having myself had to go through the shitshow that is securing family health insurance coverage on the private market.
† But actuarially incur high costs enough to fuck over multiple percentage point-sized swaths of the whole US population