Health insurance when you work for yourself

You built your own job. Did you build your own safety net?

When you work for yourself, two things that used to be handled for you are now yours: health coverage, and what happens to your income if you cannot work. Most self-employed people we meet have sorted out the first one, more or less, and have done nothing at all about the second.

Freelancers, consultants, contractors, and business owners without employees normally use the individual Marketplace. Savings there are based on your estimated household income for the year — not last year's W-2 — which is why owners whose income moved often qualify for help they assumed was not available to them.

Health coverage when there is no employer plan

• Individual and family Marketplace plans. The standard path. Subsidy eligibility depends on your projected household income, household size, and where you live.
• Off-exchange individual plans. Sometimes a fit when subsidies do not apply.
• A spouse's employer plan. Often worth comparing against — sometimes it wins, sometimes the individual market does.
• A Special Enrollment Period. If you recently left a job, you may have a limited window. See lost health coverage.

What income protection actually looks like

Think of it as paycheck protection rather than catastrophe insurance. A properly structured disability income policy replaces a portion of your earnings if you cannot work in your occupation. For practice owners and contractors there is also business overhead expense coverage, which keeps the lights on — rent, staff, loan payments — while you recover.

Underwriting here depends on your occupation and health, so it is generally easier and cheaper to arrange while you are healthy and working than to arrange later.

What else tends to come up

1. Term life if anyone depends on your income, or if you have a mortgage or a business loan with a personal guarantee.
2. Key-person or buy-sell funding if you have a partner or a business worth protecting.
3. Retirement and long-term care planning once the immediate coverage is settled.
4. Employee benefits the moment you hire your first W-2 employee — see benefits for 2 to 25 employees.

We do not open all of these at once. We start with the coverage you need now and only raise the rest when there is a documented reason to.

What we charge

Nothing. Independent agents are compensated by the insurance carrier when a policy is placed. Your rate is set by the carrier and filed with the state — it does not go up because you used an agent, and it does not go down because you skipped one. What you get is a person who is accountable to you at claim time, at renewal, and when something changes.

And because we represent many carriers rather than one, we are not steering you toward a single company's shelf. If what you already have is the right thing to keep, we will tell you that.