One of the scary things about being self employed is those sweet benefits you used to get from your employer are now gone unless you yourself budget for them. OMG SCARY!!!!!

Well, I wanted to share what I've found to be in this whole mess.

COBRA

That COBRA stuff is expensive. The letter I got upon terminating my employment offered to continue my coverage for the measly sum of $1200 a month. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Of course this varies from person to person but I think it's safe to assume that COBRA will be way more than whatever you were paying .

Some Will Still Take Cash

For the typical stuff I was able to walk into a doctors office, explain I have no insurance, I will pay cash and actually get a pretty good deal. My wife had an ear infection this past winter that spread to both her ears.Obviously the treatment did not require surgery, so for the price of a doctors visit($150) and some pills($50), I actually spent less on health care that month than the $400 + dollars taken out of my check every month under that sweet employer funded plan, $30 co-pay for the visit and whatever the price of the pills would have been under the plan. So overall the price difference for what I would call the typical doctors visit is over $230.

Get Your Own Insurance

Health insurance can be bought just like car insurance. Find a broker in your area, get some quotes and find a plan that suits you. In general my family is pretty healthy, or at least they should be. We all win when we take care of ourselves. Your mileage may vary but I will tell you, that under the last employer funded plan I paid $400 a month and now I pay about $260 a month. Granted my deductible is now $2500.00 for the year, but for my situation I should come out spending less on health care this year than I did while working for some company. I would encourage all young healthy people to at least look into getting their own insurance. Consider this, if you are healthy, you are subsidizing those morbidly obese smokers that you have to work with. They probably make more than you anyway, and now you know, you are helping them with their health care costs.

Ask How much it will cost

Some interesting things I've noticed when dealing with insurance companies, and hospitals etc... They have no idea what stuff costs until after the service is rendered. If you spend anytime in the hospital next time, ask for an itemized bill. If they can actually produce one(which they might not be able to) check out how much they charge you for a box of tissues and clean sheets. Better yet, you should ask for every little bit of service you are expected to get from a hospital or doctors office, demand to know how much it will cost. You are dealing with profit minded enterprises here. By having health insurance, you are basically giving them license to run up a nice bill.

I personally think it's unfair that they can't tell you what the cost will be for a lab test or anything for that matter. And I don't think it will change until everyone starts holding them accountable.

We were told by a doctor recently to go have some lab tests done. I asked my wife to make sure she got the cost up front. Surprise surprise, they gave her the run around. And I see now, that the labs cost $835 dollars. At least that is what was billed to the insurance company. Had she known ahead of time how much those labs would cost, she may have discussed it a bit more with the doctor to make sure they were necessary, as it turns out, nothing new was learned because of the blood tests(which I had suspected all along) and I will likely be asked to pay the balance eventually.

SICKO

Before someone asks, no I haven't seen Sicko yet, but I'm sure I will. I'm not so sure that government sanctioned health care is the way to fix things though. The prices are high because of the bureaucracy. The notion that replacing it with an even bigger one will reduce costs seems to be a stupid conclusion.