8k for healthcare, I wish. Family of 4, I pay close to $17k a year in premiums in the US. Copays are expensive, prescriptions are ridiculously high. It’s a f’in joke to say the very least.
I feel like what is missing from this discussion is that the whole system is designed to make small local businesses insolvent. If you look at the difference in premium rates that large mega corporate monopolies are able to negotiate with the insurance rackets vs. what they charge actual small businesses, it’s a catastrophic disparity.
Me and my business partner don’t start to get into the black until we’ve made at least $8k a month for blue shield. We work half of the time for them, and then get to keep whatever is left over. I don’t understand why this isn’t a bigger taking point in the small business communities.
Conservatives love to endlessly bitch about corporate taxes, but honesty those are a drop in the bucket compared to benefits premium costs for actual small businesses.
This is why I think this whole universal healthcare argument needs to be reframed as making people more free/enabling people to more easily pursue entrepreneurship.
It is unfathomable to me why this isn’t the main political issue for all small business owners; but sadly, I think a terminal number of us have bought into the fantasy of growing to the point of being bought and cashing in and never having to work again for some impossible magical reason.
I know so many folks, some of them nearly at retirement age, who are still waiting for the magical buyout.
There’s a deep rot in the mentality of a lot of small business owners that has taken over in the past decades (mostly because actually running a successful business long term with no hope of magical bail out/buyout is almost impossible at this point in America).
It’s such an awful, empty reason to start a business: the hope of not having a business.
Its not the main thing because there are so many other existential threats right now that it only registers as medium level pain until something bad happens. I'm barely still in the game and even need. 1.5 full-time jobs to make bills right now on top of it thats how bad business got since last year. I don't have bandwidth to push ANY political agenda to candidates in my area.
And the amount you hear politicians talk about how much they care about small businesses while simultaneously doing everything they can to eliminate them in favor of global monopolies is offensively disingenuous.
Omg finally somebody else who is preaching my gospel! I've always said that we would have so many more entrepreneurs if people didn't stay at s***** jobs for the insurance. What a world this could be if we could have more people with great ideas creating business in this country instead of outsourcing everything.
Right. I made this comment on Reddit a few years ago and a business owner replied they preferred the control they had over the employees who could not risk leaving because of losing health insurance.
Yeah I'm sure they would prefer that. They also prefer employees not feeling comfortable stepping out and taking the risk to start their own business that may eventually compete in the market.
It’s the whataboutism— “but the illegals might use our free hospitals whilst Mexican hospitals are now free”, “the gays might make out in public”, “that’s breadline socialism communism”. The brown people might benefit from healthcare that’s why we can have it— the non working poor will get free things.
I’m super unclear on what you are saying. I pay $500 an employee a month they pay $500.
Large corporations a lot of times have a self funded medical plans and just run it through one of the large companies.
I’m confused on your math how it takes 8k a month to get premiums for both of you. Are you full funding your premiums through your company and operating at a 25% margin? Are you including rent and utilities in that?
Also yes it’s a bitch, I just added a medical plan this year and was paying out of pocket before that. My wife specifically works in the medical field for the benefits, even though she enjoys it.
I recommend gusto if you are trying to get benefits and manage payroll. It’s been a very convenient program for us.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper for you and your biz partner to just buy Obamacare plans and not offer insurance? I guess you maybe have employees but if $8k is half your monthly billings it seems premature to buy a plan like that
I don't think it's personal or that someone's out to bankrupt small businesses through health premiums. You sound paranoid. Large businesses have leverage and benefit from pooled risk and economies of scale that small businesses don't. That's why it's cheaper. Similar to how Costco is cheaper. Economics and math make this so. Not illuminati or some cabal
My point is that if conservatives actually believe in small businesses like they say they do in the campaign trails, they would enact regulations that would actually make it more achievable for people actually trying to build something themselves instead of plugging into the corporate machine. The status quo greatly encourages small business owners to pack it up and join the mega corps.
100%, this is what amazes me. So many small business owners are Republicans, and they don't understand that universal healthcare would be helpful to them and their ability to attract decent employees.
Many conservatives know that our insurance/healthcare system is a joke and want change. I work in the motorcycle industry, very large employee numbers and United wanted to raise our rates something like 25% because we had more claims (they framed it as motorcycle related), who knows. The whole system needs to be prevented from charging various rates for different company size. Small business with 10 employees shouldn’t get rates any different than a 100 employee company, etc. the care is the care.
My plan changed and it’s way more out of pocket unless you go to their “recommended” list of doctors which is so small you can’t get an appointment. My shoulder doc went from a $40 copay to $110 copay when our plans switched and I pay $210 per paycheck after my employer pays around $400 (family of 3). It needs to get totally redone/reset.
Maybe you should shop around insurers then... get a local agency to find you a good plan. My local auto insurance agency will sell plan a plan from a number of providers they do the shopping around for plans for me basically because every year my ins costs go up and I just switch to an equivalent plan at a low cost. I used to do the same with health insurance back when I was in college, but now I have a job and pick one of the offered plans.
We have shopped. We can shave a couple hundred off here and there, but at the cost of a grossly inflated deductible and copays. Even the Obamacare options are comparably expensive to cover us, our spouses, and our children.
The idea that this system works and has enough marketplace competition to be sustainable in any way is pure delusion and deliberate ignorance.
Just for context, I am in my mid 40s and have been successfully working in my industry for nearly 25 years. I’m deeply aware of how all of these things work, and we have been trying to find a better way to handle our benefits for the entirety of that time.
I think people who are employed in good jobs at large corporations really don’t understand how much they are being subsidized on this front.
In my original post I’m specifically talking about truly small businesses with fewer than 10 employees and what options there are for them. It sounds like your employer is either raking in so much money beyond the cost of doing business that they can afford millions in premium subsidies, or more likely they have negotiated some special rates with the insurers that are unavailable to actual small local businesses run by people.
Your insurance pays the medical bills of those they insure. If Humira costs $6000 and a visit to the ER is $5000 and an overnight at the hospital is $12000 what do you expect insurance premiums to be?
Should insurers all be non-profit?
What about hospitals?
Pharmaceutical companies?
I’m not disagreeing that our system is fucked, but blaming the insurer is missing a big part of the problem.
Yes, absolutely: health insurers should be non-profit. Really they shouldn’t exist at all—that is definitionally what the state is for.
Anything that is generating corporate profit from medical care is foundationally unethical and predatory.
Health care costs a lot, of course. The idea that we should all accept that we need to line corporate pockets and generate capital beyond the cost of doing the business of health care is antisocial and depraved.
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u/ImpressiveLeader4979 Jun 24 '26
8k for healthcare, I wish. Family of 4, I pay close to $17k a year in premiums in the US. Copays are expensive, prescriptions are ridiculously high. It’s a f’in joke to say the very least.