Ask HN: Health insurance options for founders while bootstrapping
Does anyone have any recommendations on health insurance for founding team of two? We're based in California and currently bootstrapping the company.
We looked at Covered California and heard we might also qualify for medicare. Any links or resources for us to get started?
Published in 2016, this chronicle by @recmend details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 10 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 9 comments
Go to CA Marketplace and get the highest-deductible plan you can find (it will be the cheapest plan as well). You'll be paying out-of-pocket for your doctor visits, but that's what you want to be doing: the plans that meaningfully offset routine medical costs cost more than you'd pay just doing it out of pocket.
If you're both male and you have no prior health history of any sort, you can also go direct to Kaiser, Anthem, Blue Cross, &c and buy private insurance. There will be a medical questionnaire to fill out, and it'll take a little while to be approved, but it will ultimately be cheaper than the marketplace plan.
However you do it, do it carefully and follow up with your provider to make sure you're enrolled properly. Ours screwed up a bunch of stuff (both enrollment and billing) and we have some horror stories about the results.
Head to the CA healthcare marketplace site, go through the enrollment form. List your income as what it is ($0?) right now. It will tell you what you qualify for. In NY, I got a better plan than when I was employed and it's free, with no copays or deductibles either.
Everything goes through the healthcare exchanges now. Just go through that process.
If you're both young and healthy, don't have spouses and/or children, I would recommend just getting a catastrophic plan for now.
Unless you are a senior, you probably don't qualify for Medicare. You may qualify for Medi-Cal (California's Medicaid plan), which is a very different thing.
Covered California should identify any eligibility for either Medi-Cal or Covered CA exchange-plan subsidies.
What fails about the information that is provided by http://www.coveredca.com/