a lot to talk about

[Shaun]

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fnord, you are giving me a lot to think about. If I obtain insurance out of pocket, am I liable to have it dropped? what causes one to get dropped or rates to raise? do you know how self-employed people handle this? do you have a rough idea about how much it would cost on a monthly basis to support a family? ... I don't think I would be willing to undergo this endeavor if it meant the potential loss of health insurance. Any chance you could expand on this?

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I do not have a lot of answers here. I don't know what health insurers can/can't do, nor what they actually do/don't do in practice. I am probably overly cautious on the issue, but you should be able to get good advice on this. (In fact, if and when you do, please post it.)

Edit - for me, (on COBRA right now, which my new employer is picking up) I think it is about 1200/month, but I don't know if that is high or low.

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My first response was before reading your other posts fnord. A major medical condition would make our sitaution much worse. You are definitely right about health insurance being sickly expensive.

When my wife quit her job after we had our baby, we lost her health insurance and were offerred COBRA at the ridiculous price of 1065/month and like I said we have a healthy history. Obviously this sucked and so we looked into private insurance. I'm not sure how often they drop people but I certainly don't expect much from these companies because the whole business is a racket.

Maybe those of us who play poker should look into getting some kind of group started for health insurance purposes.

That said, with that kind of income Samoleus I don't think you should be too worried about it, but this depends on your age and health.