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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Just in terms of practicalities, isn't the health-insurance thing a much bigger issue for older would-be entrepreneurs? A healthy under-35-year-old can buy (sort-of) reasonably priced non-group health insurance, but I wouldn't want to be looking for it as a 50-year-old, especially with any sort of non-crystal-clear medical history.

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Here in MA we're running the 0.5 beta of health care reform, and the absolute best PPO refer-yourself-anywhere no-claim-denied coverage was $350/mo in 2010. There were high-deductible HMOs for a third that.

It's actually more of an issue for me now, working for someone else's startup, since I'm eligible for group coverage at work and therefore no longer eligible for the great individual coverage plans.

It would be interesting to hear more about how the MA plan is or isn't working. It's been such a political hot potato.

Unfortunately, all I have is n=1 anecdotes. As I'm fond of saying, we have no newspapers here, so it's hard to get data!

But I liked the state-mandated individual plan enough that I've told our CFO we'd be better served by having no health coverage. With only 10 employees, we don't qualify for anything but a low-tier HMO, and apparently risk pooling (i.e. business-association group plans) is no longer allowed in MA.

I think the individual plans might be a worse deal for families, though, which is of course a big consideration - I have no dependents.

This is only a major issue if you are in the US. Here in Australia, as well as in Canada & most of Western Europe, universal health care is a lot closer to reality.

Perhaps that's part of the reason why more than half the people at Sydney's weekly meetup group for startups (Silicon Beach) seem to be well over 30.

> Here in Australia, as well as in Canada & most of Western Europe, universal health care is a lot closer to reality.

The US has universal healthcare. Americans either don't know about it or don't like it.

And no, I'm not talking about the emergency room. Even folks well over the poverty line are eligible for medicaid, (In fact most of the so-called "uninsured" are eligible for medicaid and are signed up as soon as they actually need care.) There are free clinics almost everywhere, and county-level care is free. Most people don't know about the latter two.

Yes, folks who get chronically sick have economic problems - not being able to work does that so healthcare isn't the solution.

There are very few cases where Medicaid would be available to would-be entrepreneurs, especially older ones. In most states, Medicaid has a maximum asset level of $2,000, which would disqualify most potential older founders, who presumably would want to save at least a few thousand dollars as a cushion before quitting their job to do a startup (in some cases money in retirement accounts can also count towards the threshold, which would disqualify others). So they really do need to try to buy private health insurance in the non-group market. Medicaid's basically only a program for completely broke people living paycheck-to-paycheck.

> So they really do need to try to buy private health insurance in the non-group market.

You're ignoring the free clincs and "county".

Also, I've bought a "Cadillac" plan while being male and over 50. It wasn't that expensive.

No, I don't have an expensive pre-existing condition. Most people don't.

As a counter-practicality, a 30+ year old is more likely to be legally attached to someone with health insurance.

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