Unless Obamacare eliminated COBRA (haven't checked but I doubt it), you get to keep your health insurance for 1 year after you leave a job. The out of pocket cost is 101% of what your employer paid.
So basically, this is only a problem if you want a 13 month vacation.
COBRA still exists and it is good that it does, but it doesn't address this situation. COBRA exists to give people a safety net between full-time jobs. In the context of the original argument, COBRA is somewhat part of the problem because it too is tied into the world view of people having full-time jobs with employer-provided healthcare insurance.
If you're a contractor who is working in 3-6 months contracts you very likely aren't going to have employer health insurance coverage to begin with (thus COBRA doesn't apply to you) and will need to have your own individual plan... which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan would because of economies of scale and our steadfast refusal to make real changes to the way healthcare insurance works in the US.
> which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan would
To be fair, that's part of why you charge more per hour when contracting than you'd be making as an employee. There's also taxes (that your employer covered but now you do), vacation time, etc. You want to charge an hourly rate as an independent contractor equal to at least what it cost your employer to have you on payroll, not what they actually payed you. The difference is significant.
"your own individual plan... which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan"
I don't disagree with your greater point about the US system, but my experience is that ACA individual policies were about the same cost as what I can purchase as an (admittedly very small) employer.
If you buy an ACA plan, you're in a much larger risk pool than any individual employer can provide.
I believe you're right and I didn't make my reasoning clear in my original post, but in the case of employee-provided healthcare insurance it is common (though not universal, YMMV especially based on company size) for the employer to cover some portion of the actual per-employee cost which means a lower out of pocket cost for the employee (though not the employer).
This is another aspect of our current system that has some negative side effects -- a lot of people don't realize what the actual overall cost of their healthcare insurance is. I currently pay $46 per two-week pay period for good single-person PPO coverage (of course the actual cost to the employer is significantly more), so $92 a month. That cost becomes my mental baseline for insurance, and then I go look at the cost of ACA plans which apparently average $328 and that seems insane, over 3x the cost!!! Thanks, Obama!!! (of course, it isn't really more, the overall cost of my prior coverage has just been obscured by the old system where my employer subsidized me).
But then your comment reduces to "paying for your own healthcare is more expensive than getting someone else to pay for it for you" or perhaps even "it's nice to have people give you money."
Not that it isn't true, mind you, but given all of the policy debate around the ACA that's happening it seems a little unfair to bring the ACA into it at all.
If you're a contractor who is working in 3-6 months contracts...
This is not the situation glesica was describing:
...can't afford to be without health insurance for two weeks every few months...can't justify paying for private health insurance when their employer forces them to accept its own coverage (and won't give them the cash equivalent).
Either you are part of the individual market (in which case your vacation doesn't affect your coverage) or the employer market. In either case, you can do exactly as cookiecaper suggested. Glesica's objection is simply wrong.
I have no idea what "economies of scale" you are referring to.
So basically, this is only a problem if you want a 13 month vacation.