My advice for purchasing health insurance.

If you are worried about protecting yourself (sort of), purchase any kind of health insurance.

If you want to pay insurance companies to micro-manage your healthcare, pay them a ton of money per month to do so.

If you want to protect your financial assets and pay as you go/need for healthcare, purchase the cheapest high deductible health insurance plan you can afford and do the research to become a savvy purchaser of health care in your neighborhood. It takes a good bit of effort, but it can be done.

But in America you can’t have both:

• Affordable health insurance
• Accessible healthcare

Those are mutually exclusive in the land of plenty. And supply of primary care physicians is only getting worse (2% of graduating residents went into primary care last year) while demand will skyrocket post-50 million newly insured people. “Inexpensive” plans depend on primary care as gatekeepers to specialists. When you can’t access a primary care doctor for 52 days, what good is having health insurance? The answer…protection from financial ruin. So, choose the most affordable plan that will protect you from financial ruin. Good luck with that one…