Personally, I’ve focused on finding a place I enjoy being, rather than optimizing for income and planning to retire ASAP.
Nowadays insurance costs upto 5000$/month with high deductibles and plenty of bureaucracy and paperwork.
I have decided to not get any insurance and negociate directly with healthcare provider (They almost all give you huge discount if you pay cash so they don't have to deal with the insurance backdoor deals). If you FIRE anyways, you should really consider medical tourism and do major procedure abroad.
Everyone is afraid of a catastrophic 1M$ one time event. I get that. But if you end up paying 50k$/year in insurance cost for 30 years that you could have invested and compounded instead, do you really need insurance? For that one-off event that you could have saved for instead?
I guess my view is that I'm also ok to have a 0.1% to go bankrupt over this. We all got brainwashed into getting insurance at absolutely any costs. It is clear to me that it is not worth it at the current price.
My wife has a small business and she does not pay anywhere even approaching 40K for a pretty much bog standard policy for a ~50 year old woman. She does not go through the ACA marketplace, she gets a group policy through the company she uses for payroll.
That gives you a bronze plan with a really high deductible and out of pocket. Basically you will be paying the inflated insurance prices and mostly not reach the deductible.
> she gets a group policy through the company she uses for payroll.
That's why she pays less though. they are poolling people together through that company. (healthy and unhealthy)
In the past without insurance I was able to negotiate down a spine MRI from 2000$ to 500$ if I paid on the spot. Do with that what you want...
But essentially we are being forced to pay higher prices with insurance. Absolute scam.
That was my thought, too, until I researched what a catastrophic event can cost and in the US it's a lot more than $1M!
Do you also account for the chance that you might die everytime you take your car? Or that a meteor might hit you next time you take a walk?
At some point we need to be ok with some level of risks. That's just how the world is.
In the end I paid less than even the inflated copay I would have had to pay with insurance. (And I had a lot of procedure and visit that year).
There is a good chance your 5-10k$ of copay would become 2-3k$ without insurance (Copay are absolutely inflated based on catalog prices that insurance negociate in the background).