I see your point, but do you not think that if you're a family of 4, having to pay $40K before insurance kicks in is ridiculously expensive, and out of reach for most Americans?
I'd wager that most self employed folks in the US almost never benefit from insurance (except for things covered by Obamacare which come nowhere near justifying the premiums). The deductibles can be so high that you're pretty much always paying out of pocket.
I've had a sports hernia and the bill was about $30k.
And what the OP is pointing out is that if your injury is $30K, insurance covers nothing, because the premium + deductible is $40K.
The point of insurance is to mitigate risk. If you think you have enough money to cover your risk, there's no reason to buy insurance.
The sleight of hand here is first complaining that you did not incur enough hazards to offset the risk premium and then citing this as a reason the risk premiums should not exist. Where is the story of the family being weighed down by bills? Or of not getting physical therapy after an injury and having permanent, income-reducing disabilities?
Agreed - both to you and to society.
What's under debate is "how much risk." For most people in the US, they'll need help before they hit $40K. They can't afford paying $40K every year for medical and medical related expenses.
30% of US households make less than $50k. That’s more than 100,000,000 people in homes with less than $3.6k/mo for all living expenses. The stories you ask for are simply inevitable
I surmise that either Americans are all rich and have 40k in savings that they can lose with no sweat or
America is hell for anyone not rich
Imagine 2 people get injured in a year, you are now at $60k. Plus, $150 a visit for primary and $300+ for specialist.
My 5 year old has been to the hospital 3 times, stitches once. US healthcare will ruin you if you don't have insurance. A cancer treatment can bankrupt a millionaire.
You can get it for basically nothing in the public system but you might have to wait a year or so if it's considered elective (emergency surgery is immediate of course), but most people with private health insurance can get the procedure done within in a few weeks and would only have to pay about $1000 (US$650) out of pocket with a $500 excess (which is pretty common), because the anaesthetist and surgery are usually invoiced separately. Some plans do have lower excesses (like $350) though if you pay higher premiums.
No, nobody benefits from insurance in America. Well, nobody ill.
Self-employed here. My wife and I paid $470/month last year, $618/month next year, for a gold insurance plan than has a $3400 deductible with typically a $20 co-pay. It covers 3 prescriptions, therapy sessions for each of us, various older age diagnostic checks, and almost all office visits. In addition, if either of us develops cancer or is hit by a truck, we will not be rendered bankrupt.
So I'd say ... nah.
Deductibles too high? check
Stupid coverage limitations? check
Pointless? nope
I thought they'll all cover ER visits out of network. Is that not required by law?
https://www.emergencyphysicians.org/press-releases/2017/10-1...
> In a controversial decision, health insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield is warning policy holders—in Georgia, Kentucky and Missouri—that they may have to pay for their trips to the ER. The company has developed a secret list of diagnoses that they will not pay for, such as "chest pain on breathing" and blood in the urine, even if the patient thought it was a medical emergency.
That's really nice - are there state/government subsidies involved?
I work for a top tier company and my premiums are not that much lower than yours.
When I checked the public market's insurance options, getting a $3000 or so deductible was a lot more expensive than yours if one is not low income (i.e. not subsidized).
(a) for 2025, federal premium subsidies in effect ($19k/year of subsidy) ! (b) for 2026, NM temporary subsidies
A reminder that until the end of this year almost everyone gets subsidies. Nobody in the US, no matter their income level, should be paying more than 8.3% of their AGI for health insurance. That all changes come Jan 1st 2026, thanks to the current Congress. Our premiums would be $2531/month had NM not stepped in to use some of those sweet, sweet fossil fuel extraction taxes to help us out.
Oh yeah, deductible in 2025 was actually $2800. At our age (early 60s) and general health (good), gold plans make much more sense (if you can afford them).
If Aaronontheweb had the misfortune of getting seriously sick, required surgery .. he would pay $7,150 for something that could easily cost $100K+++. Saying he's paying premiums just for having a baby really feels like weaselly logic .. so he thinks he or the rest of his family will absolutely never fall sick? What if a cancer diagnosis hits one of you out of the blue (I hope it doesn't, but that's what insurance is for).
Insurance in America is a fucking joke.
The sound way to manage costs and avoid these games is via Medicare for all, with premiums paid by progressive rate taxation of income. Maybe even wealth beyond a very large amount.
Insurance is a pool. The bigger your pool the more you spread the risk/load. It’s brain dead simple. Medical care is a human right, beyond that.
Nothing about our system makes any sense and it is built to pad so many pockets in entirely opaque ways between you and the care you actually receive. Cut out several layers of middlemen and the costs go down. God forbid you have an accident and you end up at the wrong hospital when the one down the road is in-network but the one they took you to is out-of-network and you wake up owing thousands of dollars.
I had pretty good marketplace insurance this year but the plan I’m on now isn’t even offered anymore and if I got the next closest offered plan I’d be paying 6X as much for the premiums with higher copays on top. I’ll be switching to my union offered plan instead which is much better than the new marketplace plan but still worse than the marketplace insurance I had before.
If you examine the statement of benefits for your plan, you will find that it says something similar to this:
> Emergency Services are covered at the in-network cost-sharing level as required by applicable state or federal law if services are received from a non participating (out-of-network) provider.
> The member is responsible for applicable in-network cost-sharing amounts (any deductible, copay or coinsurance). The member is not responsible for any charges that may be made in excess of the allowable amount.
Additionally for post-stabilization care the hospital is going to shove a lot of papers in your face and they’re probably not going to tell you that one of them is the one that says you agree to pay to whatever those services and waive your protection against balance billing. Yes they’re supposed to present it on its own and with your full consent and yes you can dispute that but people sign the forms and then still get screwed.
First, there's a widespread belief that M4A is popular, based on public opinion polling. The problem is that you can make almost anything popular in public opinion polling, and a lot of public opinion polling is deliberately run by interest groups to generate narratives about popularity. It's true: the "M4A" that poll respondents support would be enormously popular: it's proposed as abstraction with no clear tradeoffs. When you confront voters with the prospect of increased taxes and the loss of their current insurance policies, the wheels come off the wagon.
The second big factor is that the demographics of people with employer-provided coverage --- the majority of all non-Medicare covered people in the US --- are not what you'd expect. As soon as you stipulate employer coverage, the cohort you're describing excludes basically all fixed-income and Medicaid-eligible households. The median household income of a family with employer-provided health insurance is closer to $120k than it is to $50k.
For those households, M4A is not a very compelling deal:
* There is a very clear trend in the data for them to already be satisfied with their existing health care.
* The visible component of their insurance spending (their out-of-pocket, excluding employer side payments) is usually quite small compared to total spending.
* M4A would mechanically eliminate the availability of existing plans (unless you came up with a truly weird and distortionate system of tax incentives to keep Anthem and United and Aetna policies going).
Best case: costs that are hidden from those households today become visible, and you hope people are chill about that (in sort of the same way we hoped that people would be chill about inflation given wage increases outpacing it --- see how that went). Worst case, a lot of these households would lose their existing, favored insurance plans and pay more.
Useful here to note that broad taxes on the middle and especially upper-middle class are how Europe funds generous social service packages; you can't get there by taxing the bejeezus out of billionaires. You should do that anyways, just because it's a good idea, but there aren't enough of them to pay the absolutely gobsmacking cost of a single-payer health system in one of the wealthiest large countries in the world.
I'll cop to this: what I wrote last night, about "currently insured" people, was way too vague. I should have said "households with employer-provided health coverage" (again: that's most non-Medicare households). I plead strep throat; you're going to have to give me a break on clarity today.
I’m still not seeing how or why it has to be worse. This just seems like an assumption you’re making. Also sure the exact existing policy you have won’t be available by definition because the system has entirely changed but once again if you want private insurance you will still be able to get it, as is the case in other countries with socialized medicine.
Also really don’t see why you would say that the polls that say people want socialized medicine are rigged and not-representative but the polls that you’re saying show that most people with private insurance are happy with it are accurate. Not really sure how that stands to reason.
I really feel like the argument you’re making here boils down to M4A is bad because it has to be worse and people who have private insurance now are happy with their plans and could only have them replaced with something that would be worse. Or even more simply: Change is scary so I guess we’re stuck with the current system and actually people like it so don’t rock the boat.
Also the median income for someone with employer provided healthcare is 120K? I’m going to need some data on that. Also you’re then cutting out everyone with marketplace insurance which is 24 million people.
More people are poised to lose Medicaid and my marketplace insurance plan, if I chose to accept it for next year was going to cost me 6X for the monthly premiums and require co-pays I don’t have before as well as much larger copays for ones I did.
I’m going to be completely honest. I don’t care if people making 120K/year are upset if their visible cost for healthcare is more obvious or not. From 2024 census data 41.2% of households made above 100K annually. That number becomes roughly 33% when you step it up to $150K/year and drops to something like 12% when you get to $200K/year. By the time you get to $400K/year you’re at like 3%.
Also households as a unit isn’t necessarily representative of the distribution of people within them.
I reject the idea that government system are inherently bad and so we can’t have them. I reject the premise that the wealthy will be forced to have worse healthcare to subsidize the majority of Americans. I absolutely reject any notion that our private healthcare as it exists is efficient, affordable and the superior system.
What I think is funny about this is, if I had left a one-line comment saying "this CEO's story about his health insurance costs tells me we all need M4A", nobody would have blinked. Instead, I made a somewhat skeptical observation about it, and got messages demanding I "show my work", or like this one, about how you "reject my thinking".
If people understand and strongly support the policy, they should probably make a point of not being totally bumfuzzled by arguments about it!
Regardless if you’re not willing to support your argument that’s fine, but at the same time if you’re going to put something out there and and then be upset if other people being skeptical of your skepticism then I don’t know what to tell you.
I still don’t really see how anything you’ve offered necessarily means people who currently have employer provided private insurance plans will be worse off. I especially don’t see it because people with incomes like you proposed the median income for households with employer provided insurance plans often have employer provided private insurance plans in countries that also have a public health system.
I guess maybe here is the meat of it and what matters. How are you defining worse off? Are you defining it based on quality of care/outcomes or in a financial sense? Either way seems pretty speculative to me but I’d be interested to know which (or both) of those you think makes them worse off.
I disagree that I’m not responding to your actual argument and am specifically asking you to clarify the terms of what “worse off” means so that I can address it with more specificity or at least understand what you’re saying.
I still think citing an opinion poll to argue that people are happy with their employer insurance while also making an argument about how opinion polling is deeply flawed is a very strange way to back up your own argument.
I have yet to actually hear anything that supports the idea that people with employer provided insurance will be worse off because of M4A other than you saying they the way the costs would be less obscured means people would be more upset. This wasn’t even an argument about the real cost of M4A vs Prost insurance, it was just a statement saying that the money looks different.
Have a nice day.
Multiple commenters are raising this point, so perhaps you should consider that you aren't conveying this information well?
2. If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically. Individual marketplace plans become a viable, for instance, since the "not covering childbirth" issue goes away. I mention the short-comings of the individual health insurance marketplace at least twice in this regard, including a big pull quote explaining the ACA work-around with child birth coverage.
Yes, but crucially none of those expanded options cost $0, so I still don't understand your math at all. I feel like we're talking in circles here.
You should be deducting a substantially non-zero number from the amount in the headline to account for your "normal" non-childbirth-year best-case medical insurance premiums (or out-of-pocket cash costs if foregoing insurance altogether).
If this was true it would be plastered in every newspaper for the last 15 years.
Given he has 3 children, 400% of FPL in 2026 is $150,600 so he's easily eligible for ACA subsidies (which, by the way, in 2021-2026, were available to everyone) by tweaking his income (easy to do when you have a company).
He also says uninformed things like:
> My wife and I are healthy, but we’re building our family and I have yet to see a marketplace plan that supports child-birth. Maybe the subsidized ones do, but I earn too much money to see those.
The premiums have nothing to do with the plans. Every single plan on the marketplace has to cover child-birth, that's sort of the point of the ACA.
> HMOs or EPOs that have some issues with them: coinsurance
What matters at the end of the day when you have a child is your maximum out of pocket (which you will 100% hit the year you have a child!). Whether you have copays or coinsurance after a deductible does not matter here. The ACA caps your maximum out of pocket at $18,400 no matter what (which, yes, is too high), so what you need to optimize for is premium + OOP for the providers that you care about.
Like, I get it, it's America, for healthcare like many other things (student loans, credit card debt, ...) it's easy to end up in a bad situation, but at some point you have to spend time understanding the game.
I am absolutely not eligible. I earn more than $150k. And "manipulating your income" is not really feasible with a pass-through entity.
> The premiums have nothing to do with the plans. Every single plan on the marketplace has to cover child-birth, that's sort of the point of the ACA.
As I mention in the piece, I check every year. I have no idea what subsidized plans include, but the other marketplace plans definitely do not include child birth.
I explicitly address this point:
> The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) barred insurers from turning down applicants based on existing pre-conditions; the way insurers get around this for pregnancy and child-birth is not by rejecting pregnant applicants (illegal), but by simply refusing to cover the care those applicants need to survive pregnancy (legal and common.)
and
> My wife and I are healthy, but we’re building our family and I have yet to see a marketplace plan that supports child-birth. Maybe the subsidized ones do, but I earn too much money to see those. All of the ones I’ve found through eHealth Insurance or Healthcare.gov never cover it - and I check every year.
Love the over-confidence though. The best outcome for me in even writing this article would be to get some internet commenter pissed off enough to find me a cheaper version of my plan. That would solve my problem immediately!
I don't know if you have a CPA, but this is a sentence my CPA has never uttered.
> but by simply refusing to cover the care those applicants need to survive pregnancy (legal and common.)
Including...? I have never heard of this, and actually have delivered babies and worked with post-partum mothers.
You are on this plan: https://www.trinetaetna.com/pdfs/Aetna_PPO_7150.pdf
Which does cover childbirth according to page 3. And has a 7150 deductible per person - the $14300 is the family out of pocket max, so the childbirth should top out at the 7150. Other expenses might put you at the same 40K cost for the year, but not the childbirth alone.
You know they charge you, separately, for both the mother's care AND the infant's during a delivery right? Those count as two people. I am, with 100% certainty, going to hit the out of pocket max - I have every time.
Like I've paid for three kids all on the same plan, including one born in January so my deductible got spread over two different billing years.
I have to ask - why are you defending this?
It sounds like you have never looked at an ACA silver plan, which is the lower deductible/out of pocket max option. I also have a family of 5, and have a $1800 per year out of pocket max from an ACA plan. You would still have the same level of premiums as you do now for silver plans, but you would save 13K a year. You are picking bad plans, dude.
Our system has problems, but when you make enough to not be subsidized, yet still pick a crappy 40K per year plan, that is beyond the systemic problems. It is a bad choice. There are insurance consultants who work with people, especially high income people, to find good plans for their family. You should be calling them.
Edit: what do I have to gain from spreading "misinformation?" I just want better / more options?
Looking through some plans now, but TBH these are genuinely not much of an improvement in the cost department and a massive downgrade in the provider selection department. Hence my whole section on trade-offs.
Moreover, what are you even trying to accomplish by asking for this? Please provide me with a forthright defense of the modern U.S. health insurance markets and why it makes sense for me to have to pay this much to keep our population above replacement level.
As for your second question, one easy response is that prospective parents in other health care systems aren't paying less (with everything factored in) but rather differently: that people making your $119k "true" poverty rate in Europe tend to be taxed at their top marginal rate, which is substantially higher than ours (in fact, in a lot of places in Europe, a Chicago Public School teacher would also be paying the top marginal rate).
A thing worth pointing out is that while the system we have is especially punishing on the uninsured, it's actually not that bad a deal for the insured, demographically/actuarially speaking. That's because being insured definitionally puts you in the cohort that excludes Medicaid-eligible poor/working class people and fixed-income seniors. If you move the typical household from that cohort to the UK, they're likely to be worse off. In surveys, insured families tend to be satisfied with their insurance, which is why taking existing health insurance off the table is such a third rail in American health policy.
Anyways, unless you personally are responsible for keeping our population above replacement level (which sounds exhausting), your numbers just aren't probative for the cost of bringing new citizens online. Other numbers might be!
Asked and answered in the piece dude - I wish I had the confidence of a Hacker News commenter who didn't read the article.
(Note that "non-ACA insurance" doesn't mean "insurance you didn't buy on the ACA public marketplace". I've got Anthem Blue Cross through our benefits provider. It is very definitely ACA-compliant.)
Also when you’re beyond the Medicaid threshold but not that much beyond it absolutely sucks. One year I was paying for dramatically worse insurance with a deductible that would have just made it better for me to just not make more money because if I hit that deductible I would be net negative on my income vs the threshold for Medicaid.
Also I think this is such a false premise. You can still have private plans if you want in the UK or elsewhere with a public health system. Nobody is forcing you to use the public system if you don’t want to. To wit, I don’t have children but I still pay for schools with my taxes. You might not want to use the public health system and instead go private, but yes, you should still be paying for a freely accessible healthcare system.
Here’s the rub on that too: The prices we pay here are so much higher than in Europe even if you go private in those countries. Our system is terrible. Point blank.
I would agree that the NHS in the UK has gotten pretty bad. A large part of that is the result of the Tory government actively working against it though for a very long time. The waitlists for a lot of things are quite long and my fiancé who is from the UK and still lives there has to do some things there are crazy to me. On the other hand she still is able to get care freely. She’s paid private for some dental work but that also cost her pennies on the dollar compared to what I’d be paying if I did the same thing here.
If you’re happy with your insurance I am truly thrilled for you because I don’t think of that as being a common experience.
But I recognize I’m in the minority. And it’s not close. Most people with private health insurance like it.
tps://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/kff-survey-of-consumer-experiences-with-health-insurance/
Most people don't use it all that much, and in the common case of employer-paid premiums, the actual cost is significantly masked. As your link notes, the more care you need, the less likely you are to enjoy the experience. They dig their heels in more; sometimes egregiously so. https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-i...
"Why would people who drive a lot care the most about gas prices?"
The more you use health insurance, the more chances you have to run into the kafkaesque bits. Someone who sees a GP once a year and thinks their premium is $50/month because that's the bit they have to chip in while their employer covers the rest is largely gonna go "this is fine!"
False. Someone with significant medical issues may well need a higher acuity plan than the employer offers. I, for example, was on the exchanges until last year, for this very reason; my employer's coverage would not have made financial sense.
> There are a lot of chronically ill people with employer-provided coverage…
The chronically ill are less likely to be employed.
that link doesn't even say what you says it does - it said you can apply for coverage, not that there are plans that cover child birth. Have you never done this before?
This same price gets you a platinum plan with Sharp or Kaiser in San Diego and wouldn't have those gigantic deductibles.
He moved his business from California to Texas and is now complaining about pricing problems in markets caused specifically by the lack of regulatory environment in Texas.
That makes me think they are artificially inflating prices so that when the insurance company negotiats their discount, well, it might be the same as what I pay
Add in phones being financed and you’re easily over $200/mo direct with a carrier.
My family has two phone lines for $50/mo, plus we buy two ~2 year old iPhones every 3-4 years, which adds maybe another $20/mo average to the cost.
> I pay that at least much for my family, hence why I used it
and your article says
> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.
It sounds like you're trying to communicate that you pay at least $200/month per smartphone for your family? Or you don't value precision in communication.
I know you've got a lot going on with a small business, and a new kid... but if money is important to you, maybe spend the time to switch to prepaid phone plans. There's lots of options [1], whatever network you need, you can do direct operator plans, MVNO owned by the operator, or like actual MVNO. If you're short on time and T-Mobile's network works for you, MintMobile has a promo going right now where $180 pays for 12 months of "unlimited" which is $15/month if you divide it out.
> I also pay $1250 per month to TriNet for the privilege of being able to buy their health insurance in the first place - sure, I get some other benefits too, but I’m the only US-based employee currently so this overhead is really 100% me.
Do you live in a state with a reasonable healthcare exchange? You might want to shop and see if an off the shelf plan from the exchange is better than paying TriNet to get access to their insurance; it may well be, but you should check. If you only have one US employee, and it's you, there's a lot of expense for not a lot of value IMHO. It's not really Apples to Apples though --- I think a lot of the TriNet plans have out of state coverage where a lot of exchange plans don't.
You're moving the goal posts here. You have to have service, realistically, in order to use it like a real person.
Is it for "a smartphone" with service, and presumably financing the phone as well? Or is it the total for all of your family's smartphones, which is how many phones/lines?
I pay $70/mo for 2 phone lines. Unlimited everything (well, OK, 5 GB data cap before slowing down).
I suspect needing to make a lot of international calls may be the culprit.
5 GB is pretty reasonable for the bulk of the country. The only common things that can make it go over are games and streaming - both of which really are luxuries if you simply can't wait till you have Wifi access. So yeah - of course you should pay a lot more if you insist on doing those things.
A decent percentage more, not a lot of dollars more.
1. Walk around everywhere (Idaho, Iowa) 2. move to New York (with ok public transportation)
Mobile phone and unlimited high-speed internet are requirements for participation in society.
I pay $7/mo (not a typo) for 1GB mobile data via US Mobile, and I have never hit that cap in many years. I just don't stream video or audio unless on WiFi, which is not a hardship. Respectfully, what on earth are you talking about?
Last month, 429MB used:
107 YouTube music
91 Google maps
70 Firefox
22 Amazon
Miscellaneous other small amounts
WiFi usage 26GB
I don't doubt that you use a lot of internet, but that amount is far away from a "requirement to participate in society" .
Also, since I live in Europe, I don't use car (otherwise would obviously not able to watch videos during travel), but public transportation. And using mobile internet is normal, nobody cares to ask for cafe wifi or to even type it in despite being visible on the wall. This is very freeing. Perhaps more than Americans can imagine, since the limits are internalized. Analogy would be the freedom Americans feel, after they move to Europe and realize that they don't have to worry about becoming broke due to sudden health problems. This is a constant worry that Americans have, but the extend of which is fully understood only after the shackles have been dropped.
Like, a lot of people here don't even have a separate internet connection at home, but are simply using their phone's shared internet with their laptops. That's how normal it is. And these "no limits" contracts are what allows the change in behavior to FULLY utilize the technology, without the need to limit oneself.
A lot depends on how one understands the word "participate". I mean, is eating the diet of only oats, eggs and protein powder enough to "have eating needs met" or is the requirement limit at "balanced food diet, with cost not influencing decisions"?
In my opinion requirement can be rephrased into "can fulfill all the phone/internet needs, without limits, without restricting oneself". So in this sense your internet requirement is 26.5GB and we have to look at the price of the phone connect that would provide at least this much at full speed.
> Mobile phone and unlimited high-speed internet are requirements for participation in society.
Sadly, I have to agree with you about mobile phones, due to 2FA. But unlimited high speed just for when you don't have Wifi a requirement? Nonsense.
If you have internet access on your phone while you're actively moving, it should work all the time, without any traffic limits or the need to keep asking for shitty cafe wifi (because your mobile internet is even worse).
It really reminds me of the Healthcare System conversations, when Americans are justifying why their way of doing things is logical and correct, while the rest of the world shakes their heads.
What if the CEO needs to supply an entire 1,332 person company with business phones?
What about an assistant to answer them! What if we're sleeping!
Oh god!
But just to put my comment in context, here is what he said:
> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.
[1]: (n.b., the plan is not truly unlimited.)
> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.
That makes it sound like this is the minimum that you have to pay to get a smartphone and service to get by in modern life.
$200/mo is definitely high for that. An iPhone 17 Pro Max with maxed out storage (2 TB) is under $85/mo for 24 months.
A Visible+ Pro prepaid plan is $45/mo ($37.5/mo if you pay for 12 months at once) if you don't use one of their frequent promo codes to get a discount.
That includes unlimited premium data on Verizon's 5 G UWB, 5 G, and 4 G LTE networks, support for a cellular smartwatch, 4K UHD video, and unlimited mobile hotspot. By "premium" data they mean no deprioritization. Visible users get the same priority as user's of Verizon's own postpaid plans.
The hotspot is only 15 Mbps, so you probably wouldn't want to rely on it if you have frequent or long internet outages, but I've found for the occasional short outage it was fine for email, HN/Reddit/etc, and YouTube videos.
This will be massively more than enough to cover the smartphone hardware and service needs for everything probably 99% of the US population needs to get by, at $130/mo.
Note that includes getting a new top of the line iPhone every 2 years. With a more modest phone and keeping it for 5 years we are looking at more like $60/mo.
We pay ~$100/month for 1G broadband (I realize this could be lowered somewhat), and ~$100-120 for 5 phone lines for the family (AT&T prepaid). I'd like to see you make a household with multiple lines + broadband work for less than $100-125.
And that's not even that hard - I know some people spend $300+ JUST on their phone plans, in addition to broadband. And then if you factor in amortized cost of phone replacement? It's closer to $200 than to $50 for example, IMHO.