> For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot.
Healthcare is one of those things that's a perk in the US, but is not such a big deal in most western countries. Hopefully the US will be able to benefit from that someday.
Healthcare isn't much of a differentiator in the kinds of jobs being discussed here. Pretty much all of them will have good healthcare plans that are as close to free for the employee as the IRS and insurers will allow.
You still have to interact with the insanity of the American healthcare system, but you're not being financially ruined by it.
When I was a consultant, I could not find a health insurance plan that was even vaguely the equal of my current job's health insurance. Not too expensive, but simply not offered.
That's not to say that job insurance is automatically good -- the job I had before being a consultant had worse health insurance that was a little worse than the plans I had as a consultant.
My plan next time I'm doing any kind of c2c type work will be to setup with trinet or another similar company to handle payroll benefits, even if it is just me.
Good luck with that... I don't know what your definition of "good" is, but in looking around when my cobra policy ran out, there were definitely limited options, none of which came close to what most of the worker policies offered, and none covered my retina doctor. The eye injections I get would be more out of pocket than my net income right now... and after 7 months out of work, I was seriously considering jobs paying roughly half of where I'd been the past few years just to maintain a good insurance plan.
I had about 12 months of buffer, but several unplanned home and auto repairs ate into that.
Healthcare is one of those things that's a perk in the US, but is not such a big deal in most western countries. Hopefully the US will be able to benefit from that someday.