Reply #2: You are welcome

[question everything]

For over five years now, I have been paying for my own health insurance - started at $200 a month and now at $250 - since I was getting tired of going through employer-sponsored coverage and expensive COBRA and back through jobs again. And I have stuck to this even though both our employers have been offering insurance.

This way, I hope, I don't have go through underwriting once I got it while still healthy. Unfortunately, in contrast to employers, I cannot deduct the cost of insurance until it, plus regular health care expenses, are more than 7.5% of our income

Frankly, I don't think that employers belong in providing "benefits": retirement and health insurance. I think that they should pay us whatever it is they pay the insurance companies and let us shop for the best coverage; and let us enact laws that make it very hard for them to drop us, and let us enact laws that they have to pay into a state or a federal pool for those of us that can no longer afford private coverage. And let us deduct those expenses, at least some of them the way self employed and employers do.

Employers can and do have access to our health information and this is none of their business. And employers do change providers and we have to change our doctors as they do.

Or.... just enact a universal coverage for all of us while still letting those who want, pay for their own.