But what if it wasn't short-term. What if YC alumni decided to band together for health care?
A group of independent contractors is maybe simpler to think about than YC and the companies it produces.
It may be that health care being tied to employment is the real problem. The customer of the insurance companies are corporations, not people. That leaves two options: become a corporation or create an alternative means to get health care.
For the startup crowd, becoming a corporation is the obvious path. Founders may go without health care during the early days, but the ones really out of luck are independent contractors.
well, as an individual, you can buy healthcare. for example, ehealthinsurance.com. or you could join a group that helps negotiate cheaper healthcare, like the freelancers union.
there are definitely options, you don't need to be in a large company to have health insurance. its just standard for a company to help pay part or all of your insurance costs. its a perk for working at a big company that you don't get working freelance or at a small business.
Individual rates can be ridiculous, organizations like the Freelancers Union may fix that.
Beyond the difference in cost per individual, when health care is tied to an employer it can be a deterrent from changing employers. For instance, an employee undergoing cancer treatment would be forced to stay with the current employer and insurance policy even if they received a better job offer.
There are some federal requirements for covering pre-existing conditions, but they do allow for a period of time where no coverage for those conditions is provided. Some states require immediate coverage of pre-existing conditions.
The original intent of this post wasn't to seek out risk-reduction in startups but to spark a discussion on how health care in the U.S. could be improved.
ah, well, you didn't word the post to line up with the intent :)
my personal healthcare improvement idea is this: make basic, universally necessary healthcare/tests/procedures/etc standardized, efficient, cheap to execute, and consequently free to all americans. this would create a standard, cheap, accessible, low-grade universal healthcare. i'm modeling this idea off of the army - their doctors are like robots with the commonplace procedures. they're done quickly, efficiently, and researched and standardized so they're cheap as hell to perform.
i'd like to think that this would make insurance substantially cheaper, since you wouldn't be tapping it for the mundane doctors visits -- only for the relative emergencies. the average healthy american wouldn't use their insurance except for once in a few years, making the premiums drop.
other than that, have the system work the same way. it would require a government investment, but so would any change to the system.
