What do founders do for health insurance?
philwelch: For some reason the health insurance industry has settled on a model of "pay your health insurance company scads of money and pay relatively little for the rationed routine care you get". Since health insurance is a heavily regulated market, I doubt this is the most market-efficient solution. Maybe if you shop around for routine care and offer to pay with cash (or HSA) it won't end up costing as much, and I've seen informal studies done by friends that show, for instance, that certain prescription drugs cost hundreds of dollars less at different pharmacies (once you can coax the pharmacies to actually tell you the price, since they're so used to working within the insurance cartels).It all depends on your health, too. If you have sleep apnea and want to get it treated, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don't have insurance. Probably better to get a full time job for a few years until your apnea is treated. If you have hypothyroidism, you can take remarkably inexpensive prescription drugs and get an annual checkup for cash cheaper than you can get insurance to cover the thing.My working hypothesis is that high-deductible catastrophic insurance is the best solution for broke, comparatively healthy adults. In this model, you're using health insurance as insurance qua insurance, to make sure you don't go bankrupt if a medical emergency costing more than $10,000 happens to you. (This of course requires you to be able to raise $10,000 if something DOES happen to you.) This does nothing for drugs or routine care, and needless to say there is no dental plan. I pay $40 a month for this. I don't get anything out of my $40 a month, but on the same token, insurance qua insurance is something you pay for but you hope you never have to use. An HSA is not a bad feature if you're going with this model.Depending upon state law, you can leave out things like maternity coverage, or get further discounts if you're in good health. A good female friend of mine doesn't have maternity coverage but she is very aggressive about birth control and has no qualms about abortion, though, so I would carefully consider whether this also applies to you or your spouse. I would also hasten to add that if there's a possibility of having more children, the expense of health insurance is not your biggest problem here.In fact, I don't know how well this model works if you have kids. Or how founding a startup works if you have kids, for that matter.