Re: Insurance options for 1099 gigs

Another of the oddities of Obamacare was that it made it much harder for people to get together to get group insurance. His successor did issue some presidential directive/decree/whatever that made that easier. My wife's employer jumped on that and formed an insurance group that was specifically targeted at tiny companies including independent contractors. The actual insurance was blue cross and included dental and optical options. As a large group, costs were about 1/3 what the ACA could provide. It took off and in just a few months they had thousands of small companies signed. Insurance companies in all 49 other states inquired about how to do this, and the bosses agreed to form a consulting company to teach and assist. Sadly a judge stepped in less than a year later and said: "Oh No, you can't have people who do different things in the same insurance pool! That's illegal per the ACA!" and shut down the entire thing after just one year. Thing is though consider General Motors. At one point in the past a GM President said: "I'm not so much administering a car company but an insurance plan that happens to make cars." Then consider that across the entire GM enterprise there are people that do thousands of different jobs from simple paperwork to heavy welding, hauling, stamping, etc. Likely they have as wide a range of jobs as the aforementioned group had. BUT since they are 'one company' they are allowed to put all those folks in the same policy. Just shows one way how government makes so little sense.
- DrF

On 4/20/2023 6:16 PM, Dan wrote:

(I suppose this could include W2 contract gigs that don't offer group
insurance.)

I'm open to considering 1099 gigs, but the thing that always concerns me
about the hourly rate is knowing how much I need to build into my rate for
health and disability insurance. Thanks to ObamaNoCare, my options for
catastrophic coverage were eliminated. I've been out of the 1099 space for
several years now. Are there groups available one can join to get a group
rate? Many moons ago, someone mentioned to me that a local chamber of
commerce might have such a group. I looked at our local C.o.C.'s website,
but it didn't mention anything about group coverage.

- Dan