On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 10:27 AM, John Gateley <tclug at jfoo.org> wrote: > This is somewhat off topic, though I'm sure there's a few > consultants on this list that have already faced this issue. > > What's a good way to get health insurance as an individual > consultant? I've seen ehealthinsurance.com and talked directly > to a couple of companies. I'm looking for a way to join a > group and so get lower rates... > > j > > -- > John Gateley <tclug at jfoo.org> > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > Ahhh, the holy grail of insurance... being on a group plan without working for a company. I myself have been searching for this since I've been self-employed. Here are the two options that I came down to: * Marry someone with great insurance benefits * Or run with a high-deductible HSA plan that covers 100% after the deductible My wife had some great benefits but is now only working part time so we are now with the second option. I've found that the maximum I'll pay out in a year is less than the monthly premium of her group plan. The sticky part about these plans is you need to make sure you have money in your HSA although the flip side is that you can contribute to this HSA before your income is taxed. The way I look at it is I would like to pay the insurance company as little as possible so I opt for the higher deductible with the lower premium. My family is fairly healthy and on no prescriptions so we don't expect to even use up our deductible so in the end we have money in a savings account (tax-free) and pay less for our insurance. I put together a spreadsheet comparing the plans that Medica offered against the same group plans we would need to pay with my wife working part time. Let me know if you're interested in how I crunched my numbers. One other thing I came across while searching for insurance was NASE that sold MEGA life insurance. The premiums were really cheap, they had all these add-on bells and whistles (similar to AAA) but what I found is that they didn't have a maximum payout. If something major happened you would be paying a percentage of the bill anyway. What I learned from that research is the big important number is the maximum you will pay in a year with your policy. -- Donovan Niesen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080917/a4006536/attachment.htm