A young coworker had an ATV accident. It was ugly, but not so bad that they weren't on IM within days talking about work.
Total bill: just shy of $100,000.
A friend's son had appendicitis. Uneventful appendicitis.
Total bill: neighborhood of $35,000.
Add to this: tens of millions of people are, despite any debilitating medical conditions or even better-than-even likelihood of incurring anomalous medical expenses at all, actuarially precluded from getting insurance on the private market. There are very long lists of widespread health conditions, most of them "chronic", most of them minor, that will land you on automatic exclusion lists (not "we will cover you but not for this condition", but, "we will not issue a policy for you at all"). Particularly if you are a woman with a functioning reproductive system.
Once again I say: I cannot understand how anybody who runs a software business or who aspires to run a software business could possibly oppose guaranteed-issue health insurance. I dealt with many dramatic problems during the operation of the company I cofounded in 2005, but the only one that was almost intractable was trying to obtain private coverage for my family. Fortunately, my wife Erin got a tech job with group health coverage and we dodged the bullet until Matasano got its own group plan.
Employer-sponsored group health insurance is a terrible system. It increases costs on new businesses and adds uncertainty to their financial planning, while at the same time retarding labor mobility. It introduces a principal/agent problem between the people selecting plans and the people who use them. Because this idiotic scheme is tax-advantaged, it incentivizes the creation of a bizarre slush fund with warped, collusive prices. At the same time, because users of health care never directly pay for it, it encourages people to make dumb decisions about their own care.
People should buy their own insurance. Insurance companies should be forbidden to decline applicants, or to constructively deter them with shady pricing schemes. People should not be allowed to exploit that requirement by waiting until they get sick to apply for coverage. The requirement should be nationwide, so that states that offer sane insurance regulations don't get sabotaged sick refugees from other states without sane insurance regs.
Minus the Medicaid expansion, which I'm ambivalent about, this is what we worked out in 2010.