Hi Mark: In California, you have two major options: Kaiser, which is an HMO that will take anyone, and requires you to visit their hospitals and practitioners, and Blue Cross/Anthem, which provides a range of private insurance for individuals ranging from cheap "catastrophic" coverage with high deductibles and co-pays. If you're by yourself, you pay through the nose for a single person policy. If you're married, and have any kind of spouse or domestic partner, and at least one dependent child, there's the possibility of creating a small group pool which gives you the advantage of getting an expensive policy that at least give pretty decent coverage.
For my wife and child and I, we started with 3 individual BC/Anthem policies, then when we learned how to form a group, we upgraded to that. It took a bunch of paperwork, but the gist of it is that, in the City of SF at least, you can add your partner/spouse to business license, which then unlocks things. At any rate, ee now pay $992 a month for the three of us, and it's quite shitty by the standard of other developed countries, but by California standards it's decent. I ended up using an insurance broker, contact info for whom I'm happy to provide off-list. Hope this helps. Best, John --- John C. Fox Founder GroupSmarts, LLC MemoryMiner - "Record memories...tell stories" http://www.memoryminer.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
