A friend of mine was considering dropping his current job and doing some contract work for a while. He has a wife and two kids, and was worried about insurance. He found that he could insure his entire family with a decent plan for about $450 a month (after spending a little time on http://ehealthinsurance.com/). Now, I'm not saying that's chump change when you're bootstrapping a business on no salary, but that's not insurmountable, either, given some up-front planning and saving.

Would a universal health care system make it even easier? Sure, no doubt. But I often hear that it's so difficult and costly to purchase individual health insurance, and that just seems to be untrue. Are there other factors I'm not considering?