Absolutely. I'm planning to move into full-time freelancing work next year, and health care is the most unsettling part of this move. It's the most unpredictable aspect of moving into a full-time freelancing role.
I'm freelancer full-time, I pay monthly to my insurance company and use healthcare services I need. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
0 - https://www.aetna.com/individuals-families/buy-health-insura...
Yes, this is the most unsettling part. Even if we can afford to pay our own healthcare now, it's very difficult to predict how long we'll be able to.
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thanks for replies to all... It's pretty impressive and prices are really, really high.
Do you have a family? Health insurance prices are far, far higher if you have a family.
The type of coverage you can by as an individual is also inferior to those you get access to at large companies, so it can be harder to get in-network coverage.
Put simply: there's little incentive for health insurance companies to provide good service to individuals; there's lot of incentive to provide good coverage to company employees.
But even so, they'll be a middle-man and they'll try to take as much profit from the group discounts they get instead of passing those savings on. An employer doesn't have an incentive to make profit there.
The real answer is that they do exist. I used Oscar for a year and their plans were actually by either United Healthcare or Aetna (I don't remember anymore) and the premiums were less and the quality was identical to what I had through a company provided insurance later. There's also Justworks that does something similar, though they're more of a full HR service provider.
2. Year-over-year changes to costs and benefits are less predictable.
2b. Continuity of coverage may itself be at risk with pre-existing conditions returning to the political debate.
If you have basic, predictable medical costs — and believe that you will stay in that bucket — these concerns may not be very relevant to you.
But a lot of people don’t fall in that bucket or aren’t confident that they’ll stay there. For these people, this adds a big risk to venturing out as an entrepreneur or freelancer.
A wholly privatized, largely deregulated health care market is toxic to entrepreneurialism because of these risks.
This reminds me, when I was in college I had a pretty bad accident, but I had some college provided health care plan my parents paid for that covered it.
Even after being employed and having employer health care, I kept renewing it incase I had a longer term issue related to the accident that my new insurance wouldn't cover due to it being pre-existing.
In particular, I had to get a rod inserted into my leg, and thought if I had a problem with it down the line, it might get denied by my new insurer.
Is there any proof of this? What makes a country "Entrepreneurial"?
Except that the American health insurance market is both regulated in the extreme and, in the case of the extremely poor and the elderly, heavily subsidized by taxpayers as Medicaid/Medicare. I really don't know what the effects of a private, deregulated health insurance market would be because we're so far from that.
I think there may be good arguments for either free market health care or nationalized health care. But whatever this thing that we've got is, it should be burned to the ground.