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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

It's not.

I'm perplexed by this. I pay $44/month for Blue Shield California health insurance. Prior to that I live in Washington state and paid only $37/month. Clearly, I'm a recent graduate, and I'm young and healthy, so lots of people won't be able to get that sort of policy. But the article specifically addresses young, healthy, recent graduates!

For some reason the Blue Shield website isn't responding for me right now, but I just checked out Anthem CA's website (the other Blue Cross/Blue Shield company in CA) and they have a bunch of plans listed right off the bat that start at $80: https://express.rwsol.com/roi/getCCRecommendations.do?produc...

Now, is $80 really that expensive for health insurance?

Not bad if you can get approved.

Doesn't sound bad, but you've probably heard of insurance companies trying to avoid paying for anything when you actually need something done.

How much are you making a month? 10/hr, 40 hours a week, that's 1600 bucks before taxes, ends up being much harder to pay 80 dollars a month from. Hopefully, you don't have student loans to pay back too. (Hopefully, you don't have a kid!)

My wife and I are both self-employed, in our late 20s, and live in CA. We pay around $150 per month for both of us to be covered, with a $4 - 5k deductible. Office visits and prescription drugs are both covered, and we pay like $40 / month for basic dental coverage.

Now, we're both healthy, which is a huge blessing. The issue of not being able to get coverage if you have health problems is one of the main problems I have with the healthcare system. That said, $150 / month for two people is hardly insurmountable.

Yeah, well, doing 5 minutes of research shows me that plans in the 300-400/month range are available.

http://www.ehealthinsurance.com

...the deductibles tend to be 2000-3000 dollars, but that's not unreasonable. If you have any data to provide, please do so, because chirpy little responses are just so much pollution.

Usually you choose your deductible and the amount of drug coverage you want. Higher deductibles mean cheaper monthly payments.

If you are a male in your 20s and you are relatively healthy, you should be able to get good health coverage for ~125 a month if you are willing to do a really high deductible, say 10k. What this means is that you essentially only have health care if you get into a car accident or something, and for everything else you need to go into a walk-in clinic and pay yourself.

If you want routine healthcare it should be closer to 200 month. It's more expensive for women, closer to 300 a month or more.

If you are in less than perfect health then the rates go up, that is if you can get coverage at all. There are also certain programs that offer cheaper than normal health care because they use they are run by religious organizations who use the first amendment to get around certain regulations and fees.

As I can tell you from past experience, 300-400 dollars a month is not a small amount for someone in their 20s with little to no income. In fact, that's a veritable sea of wealth.

If it's a choice between eating and health insurance, which it was for me at times, people will choose eating. And having a roof over their heads.

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