How many months of medical coverage through health insurance can you buy in the US for 55'000 USD?
In the case of my own health insurance outside the US, I could pay the premiums for about 11 years.
As a sidenote, living in a country where health insurance is mandatory and not linked to having a job, I am always shocked that Americans loss job and health insurance if they get fired. Isn't the getting fired bad enough, especially in today's economy?
It really really depends. If you're young and healthy you can buy many years of health insurance for $55,000. If you have cancer in remission, on the other hand, you probably can't buy health insurance on the open market for any price. Many other people are somewhere in between those two extremes.
On the plus side, it looks like the employees here are eligible for COBRA, which lets you buy into your previous employee health plan for up to 18 months. That at least gives you a semi-fixed group rate that doesn't depend on preexisting conditions. The regulated health insurance exchanges that should be opening by January 1, 2014 under the new healthcare reform will also (if all goes well) make things much better, albeit still much more complex and bureaucratic than necessary (living in Denmark now and contemplating moving back to the U.S., I'm not looking forward to the huge increase in healthcare complexity).
That is one of the problems in the US right now. Unless you or your spouse works at a business that gives good health care benefits, buying it yourself is prohibitively expensive.
The Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) is trying to remedy this by creating the insurance exchanges and making everyone buy insurance. That should all be setup sometime in 2013 I think.
Until then, I'm staying in Germany where health care is actually affordable for self-employed people.
It is only prohibitively expensive if you have a pre-existing condition. I have an excellent PPO for which I pay $200 a month, has a $1,000 deductible, and $20 copays. I'm in my mid-thirties and was a smoker for 18 years. If I had lied about my smoking, it would've been $150. My fiancee, her policy is $240 a month for the same. Now, if we had children? Yes, covering the children would be quite a bit more - as they tend to use more healthcare than we do.
One problem is that, under current law, you tend to only get those rates until you get sick. Insurance companies aren't allowed to actually jack up your rates if you get sick, but they tend to do so in tranches: every N years they'll discontinue one insurance program and institute a new one. Healthy people can apply for the new one with lower rates, but people with preexisting conditions will be denied a transfer to the new program. The old program will then enter a death spiral where only people who have e.g. cancer or diabetes are stuck there, because once you're seriously ill you can't go anywhere else (at least as an individual purchaser). Then the rates start being jacked up each year to account for the now-less-healthy pool. (This pattern is called the "closed block" problem, and some states have been attempting to add new regulations to restrict it.)
And of course if you had a childhood condition (beat childhood cancer, congenital heart defect, etc.) you can never buy in in the first place.
In the case of my own health insurance outside the US, I could pay the premiums for about 11 years.
As a sidenote, living in a country where health insurance is mandatory and not linked to having a job, I am always shocked that Americans loss job and health insurance if they get fired. Isn't the getting fired bad enough, especially in today's economy?