[builtinbuffalo]

You know you can buy health insurance, right? When you start a business, you will have costs. Health insurance, part of benefits, is one of them. You need to factor this into what you charge customers and clients.

It shows poor business acumen to assume that what you charge is what you make. You may be able to get away with that when you're doing side gigs, but if you start a business, you must plan for costs.

One of them is heathcare. If you can't afford it, maybe you shouldn't have gone out on your own in the first place.

[wwweston]

> You know you can buy health insurance, right?

Assuming we're talking about the US market, this is currently true-ish with some caveats, the biggest of which is that there's a major political party currently holding all the power at the federal level working hard to take us back to a time when some people -- even some people with wealth -- could not buy insurance (natural consequence when insurers have every incentive to be selective about who goes in the risk pool), and even some workplace groups faced limiting choices.

[jermaustin1]

My first full time job (in 2006) was with a relatively small company, but with hundreds of full time employees, and thousands of part-timers. I started right before a group policy was to be established, so every full-timer (including myself) was given a medical survey and a doctor was scheduled to come into our main campus for physicals.

Needless to say, we were denied a policy that any of us could afford. The average age at that company was over 50.

Thankfully, being young, I could stay on my parents insurance for one more year before having to get my own personal insurance.

I pretty much had to switch insurance every couple of years to higher and higher deductibles so that my monthly expense didn't grow. This was during the housing debacle, and no jobs and my current salary wasn't getting higher.

I kept my shitty insurance which wasn't ACA compliant until it was illegal to do so, and then I went without paying the fee the first year, then getting insurance through my wife's school the next year.

If the US goes back even 10 years, rates might be lower, but real care is almost non-existent.

I didn't get to have a stomach bug covered without months of fighting back and forth and medical collections calls until the ACA's pre-existing conditions clause went into effect, as I had a lot of stomach issues as a child.

[patryn20]

I've been fully insured to the extent that insurance was available. Meaning that before the ACA I was generally uninsurable so large amounts of money were set aside and state high risk pools were applied to (those are a whole other can of worms).

As someone who has done this for fifteen years, my point is that anyone looking to get into this has to plan ahead financially for unexpected situations. Even with planning and insurance you can find yourself in a tough financial situation unless you consistently earn enough money to set aside large amounts for emergencies.

And for the love of god talk to accountants and attorneys about how to structure things. If you need access to funds rapidly you don't want to screw up your taxes by being forced to draw from penalized sources.