Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

This really highlights how utterly insane our system is. I'm living off of my own business, which means that I don't have an employer to cover me under group insurance. But I really only make enough to live frugally and save a tiny amount each month--to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month.

Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the plan worthless for anything short of a car-crash-emergency-type-situation.

But not only would it not happen at that price, but as the article says, it wouldn't happen period--even though I'm a healthy, nonsmoking, active 26-year-old male, I've had cubital tunnel problems in the past (typing) and surgery on my wrist (badly broken in an accident). If I applied, I would surely be denied--and again, as the article states, if you're denied once, your chances of being accepted in the future just dropped by a big percentage.

It literally makes more financial sense for me to pay minor expenses out of pocket and declare bankruptcy in the chance of crippling bills than to be insured.

Healthcare in America is utterly, utterly broken; it's damaging poor, middle-class, and rich people alike, and stifling innovation. I have the ability to innovate with my company because I'm young, single, and healthy; but many smart people have existing medical problems, families, or other factors that make them indentured servants to the company that pays their healthcare. As a nation we're under the thumb of the insurance companies, and instead of doing anything serious about it, we've done almost the worst possible option: require every one of us to be a customer of these monstrous companies, with little regulation on cost or other government oversight. I'm the first person to back health insurance reform, but we've reformed it in the name of shoveling more money into the pockets of industry instead of for regular people needing real care.

It's crap like this that's compelling me to make my current expat lifestyle permanent. America might still get the tax dollars my business generates (the only country to still tax you if you live abroad) but it won't get my brain or my talent within its borders.

Does anyone have any experience with small-business health-care pools as an alternative to buying individual insurance? They've been talked about for a long time, and some states supposedly have programs for them, but I haven't heard much about how or if they work. Can you join one and get insurance at any sort of vaguely group-negotiated price with fewer of these kinds of problems?

The subtle but crazy part about this is at the bottom when it details the author: "Donna Dubinsky, a co-founder of Palm Computer and Handspring, is the chief executive of a computer software company."

I'm going to go out on a limb and say money is not an issue for Donna, yet she still can't even buy insurance if she wants to. I've always thought healthcare access was a bigger hurdle for entrepreneurs than tax rates. If I make a lot of money with my startup, great, I really could care less if I pay 15% or 40% of that to the gov't, because it will be a whole lot more than I make now. But not having health care insurance (or worse, having crappy insurance that denies you all the time like most individual plans do) is so damn risky it makes me afraid to step out on my own.

But it's written by someone involved in the tech world, that makes it hacker news

I think it's hacker news because hackers struggling to become ramen-profitable (or even just thinking about it!) are directly affected by the cost and availability of health insurance. It's a big factor for many people in deciding whether they want to quit their cube jobs that keep them insured to strike out on their own.