Quote from garbo:
You want health insurance?
What are you? Some kind of a communist? Love it or leave it. We don't do things that way here. Why don't you high-tail your rats arse to Europe?
www.freelancersunion.org
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Trading remote and Health insurance
- Thread starter gimp570
- Start date
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Maybe my sarcasm wasn't apparent. I shouldn't let myself write here after a certain hour... 
But anyway ... I was just voicing my frustration at the difficulty of obtaining health insurance as a self-employed person.
I know in my state at least (New York), the options are few and they are expensive. BlueCross BlueShield quoted me >$600/month for a 39-year-old male in good health, non-smoker.
That's a lot of money for something that in most industrialized countries is considered a basic right.
But anyway ... I was just voicing my frustration at the difficulty of obtaining health insurance as a self-employed person.
I know in my state at least (New York), the options are few and they are expensive. BlueCross BlueShield quoted me >$600/month for a 39-year-old male in good health, non-smoker.
That's a lot of money for something that in most industrialized countries is considered a basic right.
Try getting insurance through a group. Often groups will let you piggy back on their insurance if you join the group. Many grops just want the dues. For example, a non-Jewish friend joined B'nai Brith for $25 bucks for the year and was able to click into their group rates. I am sure there are other similiar ways to get group rates.
In most of those countries, it STILL costs a lot of money BECAUSE it is a basic right . . . most of them have much higher taxation than the U.S.
Taxation by country as a percent of GDP (1999 numbers):
U.S.A. 28.9% of GDP
U.K. 36.3%
Canada 38.2%
France 45.8%
Germany 37.7%
Ireland 32.3%
Italy 43.3%
Japan 26.2% (private health care?)
Norway 31.6%
Sweden 52.2%
Health care is expensive no matter where you write the check to, especially if you run it through the government for skimming as it makes its way to the health care provider. While having guaranteed health care as a "basic right" would be great, it doesn't make it any less expensive; what it does is increase the total amount of money spent by society on health care, and probably increases the cost per "unit" of health care (however you measure that) because of the cost of increased government control.
What we're looking for is the most cost-effective way to spread risk (uncertain future health care costs for a given individual) across a group of people in order to avoid catastrophic losses to any one individual. Our insurance system has definite problems, but I'd rather use a (regulated) private system than have the government run the system, as it would have to be if health care became a "basic right". The initial concept of spreading risk across a larger group in order to insure everyone would be attractive if it could be done without the politicians adding all kinds of other expensive baggage in the name of protecting us.
Enough philosophy - off my soapbox - back to hunting the best insurance policy.
(Data source: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/international/gdp.cfm)