I'm not in that position, but a relative is -- minus the illness part, as far as i know. I think their rates went up over 20% last year. Although they are not a tech start up; rather, medical, and already established for some years.
My real concern is that people in the U.S. are, these days, paying "life" rates for what is essentially "term" insurance. Take an all too typical contemporary example. Someone has held one or several jobs that included health care insurance from the time they graduated, say two decades ago. During that time, they may well have paid significantly more in insurance premiums than they received in care -- as a statistical average, their demographic certainly did. (I don't care whether they employer paid some or all of the premiums; call it an indirect wage, if you will.)
Now entering the latter half of their forties, and at higher risk, they are sh-tcanned by their (latest) employer and face extended unemployment or a job that doesn't offer health care benefits.
If they were still in employer provided coverage, they'd still being paying in their X per employee per year (simplifying away the differences between diferent employer-provided plans). It might be time for the system to, on average, pay back some portion of all those accumulated premiums. Sort of a "whole life" insurance policy, from a health insurance perspective.
Instead, the "accrued benefit" (I know this is a crude analogy) has fled along with the job.
Aside from arguments about innovation and economic growth, the current health care insurance model in the U.S. is simply not coherent nor predictable with regard to providing coverage. For many, a third party -- one increasingly having wildly diverging interests -- is in control of their coverage.
Many people would be happy to pay into a pool at the kind of pricing the major employers receive. But as independents, they don't have that option.
You can get expensive, crappy health insurance as a startup, but for a lot of great candidates, quality health insurance is a hard requirement.