[tayl0r]

That is one of the problems in the US right now. Unless you or your spouse works at a business that gives good health care benefits, buying it yourself is prohibitively expensive.

The Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) is trying to remedy this by creating the insurance exchanges and making everyone buy insurance. That should all be setup sometime in 2013 I think.

Until then, I'm staying in Germany where health care is actually affordable for self-employed people.

[drone]

It is only prohibitively expensive if you have a pre-existing condition. I have an excellent PPO for which I pay $200 a month, has a $1,000 deductible, and $20 copays. I'm in my mid-thirties and was a smoker for 18 years. If I had lied about my smoking, it would've been $150. My fiancee, her policy is $240 a month for the same. Now, if we had children? Yes, covering the children would be quite a bit more - as they tend to use more healthcare than we do.

[_delirium]

One problem is that, under current law, you tend to only get those rates until you get sick. Insurance companies aren't allowed to actually jack up your rates if you get sick, but they tend to do so in tranches: every N years they'll discontinue one insurance program and institute a new one. Healthy people can apply for the new one with lower rates, but people with preexisting conditions will be denied a transfer to the new program. The old program will then enter a death spiral where only people who have e.g. cancer or diabetes are stuck there, because once you're seriously ill you can't go anywhere else (at least as an individual purchaser). Then the rates start being jacked up each year to account for the now-less-healthy pool. (This pattern is called the "closed block" problem, and some states have been attempting to add new regulations to restrict it.)

And of course if you had a childhood condition (beat childhood cancer, congenital heart defect, etc.) you can never buy in in the first place.