It's a pretty terrible market out there if you don't have an employer subsidizing it and using their size for negotiation leverage.
No, we can't. If we could, we would. Things are like this because we want them to be like this: it's reflected in how we vote. We've had candidates pushing for "Medicare for all", universal healthcare, etc., and who gets elected? The candidates promising to go the other direction. Clearly, American society and its voters do not want this.
Just because Universal Healthcare didn't catch on the first time doesn't mean it's dead forever.
It'll happen eventually. Maybe in 4 years, maybe in 40.
All of that aside, it's impossible to know how much you're actually going to visit the doctor aside from chronic ailments.
don't know how it is in the US, so this may look uninformed, but are you getting extra $$$ added to your salary, equivalent to what the employer was paying for the insurance?
Typically people opt out of company insurance because of one of the following reasons: It's cheaper for them to find services through the marketplace (extremely uncommon, but possible), They have superior insurance through a spouse or family member, they feel that the insurance they're provided with isn't sufficient and they would prefer to purchase better insurance themselves.
Edit: My wife though pays more for her company insurance as they would need to insure me as well.
Personal commentary:
As someone from New Zealand, who moved to Canada, I still don't understand why people would want the responsibility of their employer and themselves to choose what health coverage they want in life, especially when employment tenure can be upended so easily.
Yes I know, USA has funky research and new drugs and whatever, but as a whole, it doesn't seem like a particularly efficient system. So if it's not efficient, what's its objective? For me it sounds like prioritising medical providers to extract the maximum amount of revenue from captive customers, in a scheme where all the prices are similar so it's not a monopoly, but none of them are cheap, so it's nearly like a cartel.
Citations: (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...