To explain, your "income" in early retirement is a combination of money you're converting from an IRA to a Roth IRA, capital gains (as you sell investments to cover expenses) and dividends on your taxable brokerage account. If your expenses are in the $40-50k range annually, you might only be paying on conversion income, and relatively low taxes on long-term capital gains. Overall, you can qualify for health insurance subsidies at this level of taxation, and get a pretty good plan without a lot of out of pocket expenses.
Here's one example of an article going into the details:
The main benefit of employer purchased health insurance is that you buy with pre tax dollars.
Except for a few situations, it's mostly bottom tier insurance pools.
Meanwhile, my insurance PPO ranged from $0.0 month (high deductible) to max ~$50.
Your portion of the insurance premium was $0 to $50 per pay period via your employer, but the cost of your insurance was still much higher, probably the same as healthcare.gov. Check code DD in box 12 of your W2 to see how much your employer paid, and you can compare the actual price of your health insurance.
Edit: NJ puts out a nice document that anyone can estimate their premium for based on metal level and age. Note that $2k per month would be for family coverage of 2 old people, but for young people it would be a third. Also note that prices for young people are extra high due to subsidizing old people due to stipulations in ACA limiting premiums for old people to be 3x those of young people. See “age rating factors” box at bottom of pdf.
https://www.nj.gov/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcrates20...
It's really not the same, or even close. Let's take one of the more popular plans on the exchange for Washington state.
https://www.insurance.wa.gov/rates/bridgespan-health-company...
https://www.insurance.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/bri...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/632151/premiums-for-empl...
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2020-11...
https://files.kff.org/attachment/Summary-of-Findings-Employe...
Keep in mind "private employers" is a huge bucket and would encompass a wide range of companies, including smaller companies with likely small budgets.
It is not reflective of many of the benefits many SWEs would get.
Just because an employer is paying for $18k out of $20k of your annual health insurance premiums (again, check code DD box 12 of your W2), does not mean that health insurance costs (meaningfully) less for an employer. It is simply a portion of your total compensation, which both employer and employee prefer to go via the employer due to the ability to purchase it with pre tax money, hence an immediate savings of 30% on the insurance premium portion of one’s expenses.
To go back to the root of this conversation, my purpose was to clarify that “healthcare via employer” is simply an artifact of the tax code and results in savings of tax rate * annual health insurance premiums.
Your total private insurer cost is all of the US, which includes many small businesses which are on inferior plans. But for an swe, your total premium cost is far less (regardless of how much your employer chips in) due to the fact that your private insurer pool is filled with relatively wealthy, educated workers. Private mom/pop pool != private Microsoft/Amazon pool.
What you're saying is just...wrong...for most talented eng workers.
Is this data available somewhere? I cannot find anything specifically related to big tech companies, although I did acknowledge about there might be some slight advantage due to population. But many of these tech companies are huge with tens and hundreds of thousands of employees. I highly doubt Amazon, with 1.2M employees, most of them not highly paid software engineers that sit in chairs all day, has a risk pool that is materially less costly than any random healthcare.gov plan.
The only other way is if some people here employed by FAANG pipe in with what their W-2 says the employer paid portion of their health insurance costs were.
But back to my original point, is that the quality and cost of health insurance on healthcare.gov is comparable to what employers offer (many times it is the same product sold by same insurer). And it is at the same cost, just the tax treatment differs when an employer pays for a portion of it.
The main benefit is that my employer pays most of the premiums. As an example, I have a high deductible plan. The deductible is only about $3750/year. I pay 0 in premiums. The equivalent health plan from healthcare.gov is easily over $10K in premiums.
You can get the same healthcare, the only distinction is do you have enough money saved up to buy it from your savings or do you need to continue working to afford it, just like everything else in retirement.
I'm not sure what it covers.