regarding #2, the math isn't necessarily clear at all. I actually have no idea how much my health insurance costs. my employer isn't required to fill that box on my W-2, so they don't. I'm mostly convinced that the average cost would be lower, but governments in the US do seem to have an incredible ability to waste money.
In California it's about $500-600/mo for a "Gold" level PPO plan for a 20-30s individual through CalChoice Small Business pool. Bronze level plans are usually in the high 200s to low 400s. HMO plans are usually about $100-150 a month cheaper than PPO. Vision and dental are another $20-50/mo. Spouse roughly doubles the cost, and kids add more to it, but I don't remember the exact amounts.
Keep in mind that even with the Gold level plan you are still subject to network restrictions, paying copays, deductibles, and you have an OOP maximum of several thousand dollars.
Big companies can get better rates than individuals or smaller companies and businesses get to write off the expense, whereas individuals (mostly) can't. It's only the governments' fault insofar as they haven't done something about this already. The rules were written to enable corporate profits, not quality, cheap healthcare. Even as a small business owner, trying to offer healthcare was brutal just from the sheer expense of it. It's almost hard to justify unless you have kids or a chronic condition, but you never know when catastrophe will hit, so the market is fairly price-inelastic.
Well, my insurance for a family of four cost slightly more than 10,000 last year (both employer and employee sides). You could triple the amount I paid into Medicare in exchange for Medicare covering everyone and I and my company would come out ahead. There has never been a year where I have been paying for insurance that it has not grown faster than inflation.
