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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

It's not really tied to employers. There's no law stopping you from purchasing it yourself. The government just gives a tax break to companies who give it as a benefit. So they hugely incentivize it.

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As someone who buys their own insurance, I have to say there are so many problems with the process. You make it sound like it's as simple as ordering a pizza...

Firstly, the major insurance companies don't want to talk to you, so you need to buy through a broker. The broker is suppose to help you pick the plan that's right for you, but realistically they will email you a few PDFs with 5-7 plans that are all extremely similar, full of jargon, and difficult to understand.

Find a better broker? Hah, good luck...

So after you become an expert on insurance jargon, and ask your broker lots of question, you're now ready to start paying. For small plans with fewer than 5 people, get ready to pay anywhere from $700-1k per month for the most basic high deductible plan.

Then after about a year, you'll get an email and phone call from your broker because your plan is no longer available. So you need to pick a new one, that has slightly different features and costs $20-100 additional per-year.

The American health insurance is a parasite.

> You make it sound like it's as simple as ordering a pizza...

It is as simple as going to healthcare.gov

You don’t need a broker and it takes 15 minutes at most. It’s just as expensive as any employer sponsored insurance, except for a handful of self funded plans from white collar companies which might be able to offer cheaper insurance since the employees skew young and higher socioeconomic class.

This is completely false. Insurance is far cheaper for large companies since the risk is being spread amongst a very large pool of individuals.

The pool of lives of a whole state is large enough. Where some large companies benefit is having younger workers who are in a higher socioeconomic class, which usually means healthier and therefore less expensive.

Checkout code DD of box 12 on your W-2 and compare to the same metal level plan for your state here:

https://www.kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/average-ma...

I’ve compared it with a few different people working in Fortune 100 companies and it’s almost the same.

Well you can now look for plans on the state health insurance webpages. That does provide some amount of transparency but not for actual service pricing. But it is a bandaid on the original problem that you need to disassociate healthcare from employment and income level.

Also the ambulance services in this country are a total racket and can charge whatever they want. https://khn.org/news/taken-for-a-ride-ambulances-stick-patie... This is not a free market system it’s 100% corporate welfare enforced by taxpayer subsidies to the insurance companies. Ugh.

I never said you could do it in the sense that it's easy or cheap. I very specifically pointed out that you could do it in the sense that it is not illegal to.

You seem to be being deliberately obtuse. Yes, you could literally go buy the exact same amount of coverage as an individual as you’d get from an employer-sponsored group plan. But, since even employer-sponsored plans are frequently quite expensive, especially if you have children, that effectively prevents most people from doin so.

You actually can't really do that since workplace health insurance plans actually cover some of the costs that insurance bills. Like, your work literally pays a bill.

This isn't something that you can replicate.

I'm pretty sure given enough money, you can replicate it, but that's also exactly the problem -- given enough money. More and more these days it seems there's no amount that's enough.

You're actually agreeing with me, I think.

I said you can buy the exact same amount of coverage as the workplace plan, but the price will be so high as to be prohibitive.

As someone who has been buying my own health insurance for 15 years, you absolutely cannot buy the same exact coverage as an employer. They have MUCH better plans than what are available to individuals (in the three states I've lived in, anyway).

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