Health insurance costs are VERY dependent on your age.
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The costs for 2015 should be out in early November. Hopefully there'll be some reductions in premiums (Hey, I can dream, right?).
Firstly, I wouldn't hold my breath for reductions in the cost of open market insurance. The only one I've seen go public was BCBS of NC, which announced an average of 13% increase versus 2014 rates. I'm still upset that they played politics and delayed open enrollment to just after the election. The law was written that ACA open enrollment was supposed to match Medicare open enrollment, opening in mid October. Whatever.
Anyway, as a test, I ran 4 quotes for my own area, telling it I am 25, 35, 45, and 55 years old:
Cheapest coverage, same location, individual:
Age 25: $104/month
Age 35: $172/month
Age 45: $203/month
Age 55: $314/month
So basically age 45 is twice as expensive as age 25, and age 55 is thrice as expensive as age 25. I also ran it for age 64; the age before you qualify for Medicare:
Age 64: $422/month
So by age 64 you're at 4X the cost of age 25. Of course, those are all catastrophic individual coverage plans, not really the kind that a young family with small savings would actually want to have. I reiterate the same thing I said in a previous thread: our healthcare system was poor before and it's basically flat out broken now. Since healthcare is not covered by the traditional laws of supply and demand do not apply. Nobody decides to start taking cancer treatments just for fun, nor does somebody who is having a heart attack stop to say "Hey, let me shop around for a while and see what healthcare providers offer the best rates for me. If they are all too expensive, I will just pass on it and recover from my heart attack some other time."
I hate the idea of the entire US healthcare system being run the way that we've learned that our VA hospitals are all run, but what we're doing right now is broken almost as badly as the VA hospitals anyway.