We had to move for other reasons than her job, but consider that there are many people doing work that other people do, who are motivated to do things like start a business, but who are otherwise unable to do so because of the US healthcare system.

Additionally, consider my parents, who are also working not because they need the income per se-- they could retire and live well-- except for the costs and difficulties of purchasing health insurance on a private market.

So it isn't the case that people are just universally "going on the dole"... making private insurance closer to the same cost to purchase health insurance regardless of your status as an employee shouldn't affect the overall bottom line of the leeches who provide insurance.

So, like about 1 in 4 folks in Texas, we went without.

This is a common misunderstanding. For most people in this situation, the laws on the books already took care of the problem. If she already had healthcare insurance at her previous employer, if she could show continuous coverage, she would be able to continue to purchase healthcare insurance privately, despite her preexisting condition.

Whether the private insurance would be affordable to you is a different question, but it's not true that a preexisting condition was, before Obamacare, a complete roadblock to acquiring coverage privately.

Under HIPAA, continuous coverage ensures acceptance into group health care plans (for instance, employer-provided coverage) regardless of preexisting conditions.

Further, continuous coverage ensures acceptance into some form of individual coverage, of a kind determined by the specific state you're in.

I do not believe it is the case that continuous coverage guarantees acceptance into individual health care plans.

In 19 years of working, and (more relevantly) 15 years of marriage, I have never had a lapse of health care coverage for myself or my family. When we started Matasano, I had just previously left a full-time, full-benefits job at a larger company where I'd been working for 4 years. I elected COBRA when I left, and started shopping for individual coverage.

We were unable to get family coverage at any price in Illinois because of preexisting condition concerns for two members of my family. In both cases, the rejection cause was a total surprise, because the "condition" wasn't an ongoing health problem, but rather a piece of medical trivia that caused underwriters concern that there might have been more significant issues down the road.

I shopped for insurance myself, and then with a professional broker who I paid to deal with the problem, and who could not find a way around it.

We solved the problem first by my wife taking a full-time job outside Matasano, which got us group coverage, and then by starting group coverage at Matasano.

And you're right; I believe that there were options open to her, specifically our state's high risk pool, which wasn't a viable option due to price.

But, heck, if price isn't a factor, why do we need insurance at all :D ? I mean, we always have the option to just purchase healthcare directly; whether that will be financially feasible, is, of course, "a different question".

I actually worked with someone (who knows python, JavaScript, c#, t/sql, etc.) who had to work loading boxes at UPS on the night shift while he was between jobs because, while he could afford to quit and look for a new job, he couldn't afford a gap in his insurance. It's not that he was sucking down tons of services either - just having a gap would have been bad news.

Now I hear that jobs at Whole Foods and Starbucks are pretty good all around, but there are others that I think will rightly need to pay more going forward.

I don't get it. If we are footing the bill, then it will make higher taxes, but if the insurance companies foot the bill then health care costs increase. There's no reason for both to rise (unless we subsidize the insurance companies through taxes on the insurance companies...)

The "visible foot of the government" is quite enough. 2,000 pages of unread "law" can force all sorts of negative changes, and then there's the electronic health record (EHR) requirements in the "stimulus" bill, including the single sentence on requiring "meaningful use" which expanded into 700 pages of regulations, a lot of well paid consulting, and what looks like so far worse medical care as healthcare workers have to focus on the computer instead of the patient to avoid losing their jobs.

There's also the host of taxes in Obamacare; just the medical device tax alone will obviously raise the cost of care.

Risk corridors by themselves, obviously not. Except if you ignore the fungibility of money aren't they ostensibly paid for by taxes on policies??

On the other hand "guarantees" will put less pressure on insurance companies to put pressure on suppliers of health care, resulting in less displacement to other customers.