| After I went more free style I got my own insurance. Then I usually do not go with any employee health plan, it changes yearly anyways and adds friction to changing jobs/contracts. If more people did this we could solve this. It does suck that when you are on your own you have to either join a group or be rated at the individual/family level. If we fixed grouping in health insurance this would be much better. Grouping like how Medicare does it across all private insurance would be much better. The great thing about not taking work insurance is no extra cost, can easily go from contract to contract or full time for a while, and with your own company it can be expensed. The only downside is the part work would pay for, however you don't get any say in the type of insurance or what companies. You can ask for a small bump in pay to help cover it. Companies would prefer not to have to deal with health insurance as it is a competitive weight in the US. Private insurance and public options, both separated from the employer is the way to go. We don't get our home/auto/life insurance from work, why do we get the most personal type of insurance, health, from employers. Not only that healthcare bound to the job leads to all sorts of problems, ageism, harder to change jobs, harder to compete with other countries and more. If developers starting doing this more, we alone could change the legacy employer/healthcare coupled system. |