Comment by RestlessMind
9 years ago
The biggest question I face regarding early retirement in the USA is how to handle health care expenses, because the situation is so messed up. There is huge uncertainty around the future of healthcare, especially regarding coverage and quality.
So far, all the early retired people I have seen have either a working spouse or have retired abroad. It would be great to know if people here, especially those who retired early, have solved the problem of healthcare coverage.
At least with the Affordable Care Act (which survived yet another repeal-and-replace attempt this week), it's possible to buy insurance on the open market with a pre-existing condition (which I assume that almost everyone older than their 20s or 30s has at least one). So for now health insurance is an expense you can plausibly budget for and not something that's completely unattainable at any price.
Given the political uncertainty around ACA until now, I would say its a rational decision to not rely on it. Sure, it survived this round of repeal efforts, but I am not sure if it is going to survive next 10 years. There is a very good chance that it will be replaced, and only a moderate chance that replacement will be better than what we have today.
From my own experience, most people have not. I work in aerospace and there are a large number of employees with 30+ years tenure who are of retirement age who need to stick around because of the quality and cost of the health insurance coverage. Engineers with good salaries who have saved much more than the average Joe, much more than most "financially independent" bloggers.
True, I think in 10 years we will have single payer or at least buy into medicaid as a start.