Outside of the altruistic and technical reasons, it's a great background check for technical interviewers. It's pretty hard for me to lie about my contributions or quickly make up 2-3 years worth of github history. It also gets around all those pesky NDA's I've signed such that I can't show my paying work to anyone.
$2k/mo seems expensive even for comprehensive plans imho unless you have some conditions that bump it up. We're relatively healthy, two small boys, and opted for catastrophic/HSA option. Then we put the savings from the premiums into the HSA. I've found even with the routine visits for the kids and whatnot we still pay less than we would going with comprehensive. And worse comes to worse our total out of pocket is the same regardless. Point being, if you don't see the doc much, HSA makes sense. One nice thing is that our provider pays 100% of flu shots and routine health checkups which is all I use it for anyway.
That said... if you're starting a family... pregnancy (and RX) are usually (ever?) covered. So you might not have a choice.
As a small business, if it's just you and your wife (and your dependents) you can deduct the premiums though...
> That said... if you're starting a family... pregnancy (and RX) are usually (ever?) covered. So you might not have a choice.
HSA's do seem to make sense, but the pregnancy and any potential complications were my main concern. It seemed from initial research that for this scenario, and regular plan seemed like the best option, unless you had a different experience? Perhaps use a typical plan initially, then switch to HSA's later assuming health is ok?
We had the 1 dvd at a time (+ blu ray option). So, for us the price jump was close to double. Our last DVD sat on the shelf for 3 months before we got to it. But we watch streaming a lot. So we canceled the DVD option and figure that $8-9/mo we'll use at the redbox near us if there's something recent we want to watch. That's more movies than we can watch anyway (or that we can get via netflix with the mail delay)... I'm sure a lot of the 800,000 were like us.
