Ask HN: Bootstrapped US founders, who do you use for health insurance?
I'm a single founder in California, and via CoveredCA a decent health care plan (PPO) silver from Blue Of California costs $460 a month. I don't qualify for any discounts so I have to pay full individual price.
So $5,520 a year for health insurance! Ridiculously expensive. I'm looking for any other options, perhaps plans geared toward small businesses with less subsidies.
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A little background: The health plan market roughly divides into individual health plans, small group (2-50 FTEs), and group. You fall into the individual market, at least for now, it seems.
A small group health plan isn't likely to be much less expensive, if any, and the small business health exchange SHOP (CoveredCA, Healthcare.gov, etc), the plans are pretty much the same individual plans.
The Affordable Care Act defined Essential Health Benefits (EHBs) which are basically a way to ensure that common and critical types of health care are guaranteed to be covered, along with a variety of other market making aspects (individual mandate, pre-existing conditions, etc). Prior to this, people could sell "health insurance" which covered few services, had strict amount limits, and could deny claims for various unclear reasons.
If you're going to earn less than $50k in 2017, then you'll qualify for a subsidy on your plan. If not, your options are going uninsured (potentially getting a tax fine at the end of the year), or enrolling in an individual market plan.
Stride Health, https://www.stridehealth.com ↗ helps consumers enroll in plans through CoveredCA and Healthcare.gov, as well as directly through the health plans. * Prices are the same you'll find anywhere else (they're set by law). I'd encourage you to try it, and hopefully it will take some of the headache out of it. * There's a support line with a very knowledgable staff if you have more questions about the impact of your income earning for the next year, or any more questions about your health care needs. * We'll also be there to help you throughout the year, and make sure to close the loop with your taxes the following year.
A little off topic but I decided to look this up.
What would taxes be if we compared the US to Canada?
Using the following two tools: https://simpletax.ca/calculator ↗ https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator ↗
For 50k a year in British Colombia for Canada and California for the US I get the following:
BC: $8,372 CA: $11,112
At 100k with 18k contributed to 401k/RRSP the numbers are 17.5K and 25.8k for BC and CA.
Unless I missed typed something because it's late we Americans are getting a raw deal. I realize Canada has VAT, but CA has very high sales taxes and I did not include the cost of an exchange plan. What you are looking is the Income and FICA taxes alone.
This is something I've been looking into for the last few weeks for my 3 person NYC based startup. All of the options through the exchanges/brokers are laughable. If you are young and healthy, a catastrophic plan might be your best bet. I was paying ~$125 a month for Oscar last year. Coverage only kicked in after ~$6600, but I was just looking for something that covered me from an IRS/penalty perspective. The premium went up ~33%, but sadly that is still my best bet without a company plan.
We just signed up for JustWorks, a PEO, primarily because their healthcare plans are much cheaper than going direct to brokers as a 3 person company. They require 2 people though so if you are solo I don't think this is an option for you.
Ha, that's a deal. Prior to joining my current company, I was paying almost $2k/month.. and that was up from $1k/month just 4 years before. :(
I'd recommend checking out your local professional associations. IEEE and ACM have some options:
https://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/discounts/group_insurance.html ↗
https://www.acm.org/membership/insurance-programs ↗
We use a direct medical expense sharing non-profit. Ours is called Samaritan but there are a few of them. Basically, every month we write a check for about $460 to another member, and the one time we had a hospital stay, we got a bunch of checks to cover the full amount. (It covers everything but $300, but if you negotiate the price down at all, the full amount is covered.)
That's a family plan price and we were looking at 2-3 times that with a big out-of-pocket obligation on the Exchange. So far it's saved us about $10,000 and we really like the communal model.
(Posting under an alt account to avoid giving out too much personal info)