[_delirium]

It really really depends. If you're young and healthy you can buy many years of health insurance for $55,000. If you have cancer in remission, on the other hand, you probably can't buy health insurance on the open market for any price. Many other people are somewhere in between those two extremes.

On the plus side, it looks like the employees here are eligible for COBRA, which lets you buy into your previous employee health plan for up to 18 months. That at least gives you a semi-fixed group rate that doesn't depend on preexisting conditions. The regulated health insurance exchanges that should be opening by January 1, 2014 under the new healthcare reform will also (if all goes well) make things much better, albeit still much more complex and bureaucratic than necessary (living in Denmark now and contemplating moving back to the U.S., I'm not looking forward to the huge increase in healthcare complexity).