But whatever, it did suck to pay ~$1K per month for health insurance.
If you’re billing at $300/hr and working when and how you want, it actually seems immensely disingenuous to try to associate with the sympathies for people stuck in the gig economy con job the tech tyrants have been imposing on society as a kind of excuse why you couldn’t manage to fill your consultancy pipeline.
I also guarantee he could have gotten health insurance, he just did not feel comfortable paying the roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per month it would have cost because his business pipeline was not full of work consistently.
People don’t realize just how much health care costs, regardless of whether it’s American employees who don’t realize the employers contribution is about 4-5 time what they pay monthly, or the worshiped and beatified “universal healthcare” that is “free” in Europe where massive taxes are paid to augment the also massive individual monthly cost taken out of people’s paychecks.
The American system costs way more for comparable care, precisely because of our insane system. Every single dollar or hour spent on medical billing issues and dealing with insurance and arguing over who pays is total deadweight loss.
I don't think it's abnormal not to want to pay those rates.
$1,000+ a month is absolutely insane for health insurance and at $2,000 a month you're now beyond the cost of most rent for something that you'll hopefully never need to use for decades, but more importantly you have no options. It's either pay massive fees (+ copays, etc.) due to no real competition or go without insurance. For the last few years no insurance also came with paying thousands upon thousands of dollars a year in fines too.
I am an uninsured freelance worker too for reference. But that plan definitely wouldn't work out if I had a family to insure, and then the costs are astronomical to the point where you would be in debt and have no savings unless you were absolutely crushing it.
Worth noting that American per capita spending on healthcare is much higher compared to European countries despite a lower life expectancy.
Before Obamacare and without the ability to bargain as a large scale employer, my insurance options were limited to "defined benefit" plans where the maximum they'd pay out in an emergency was limited to about what you paid in in about a year or so. Effectively no emergency coverage, just incidental stuff.
Another fun feature: preexisting conditions. For which insurers will pay $0. It's pretty horrible, and one state where I lived passed a law so the pregnancy could not be considered a preexisting condition for insurance purposes. Which meant that if you were pregnant you were denied coverage at all. By everyone. Without exception.
Perhaps your state had a $1k/mo option for insurance, mine did not. Even at $5k/mo (if I had it) plans would not cover an emergency. None of the plans available to the self-employed would.
I do agree without reservation that linking healthcare to employment is crippling for independent contractors. As I understand it, the setup allows employers to deduct substantial costs from taxable income. So basically governments are subsidizing the obscene profitability of health insurers, the pharmaceutical industry, and some provider sectors.
Back in the late 90s, I was able to get ~affordable health insurance through AFL-CIO SBWA Local 125. But that service went down in flames, so I ended up paying ~$1K per person. As I recall, I could deduct 50% of medical expenses, but it was still the largest expense after mortgage and taxes.
And if it had been $5K per month, I couldn't have managed it.