This is a stinky situation. Even with the healthcare exchanges, it's usually cheaper and much less of a hassle to get your health insurance through your employe

This is a stinky situation. Even with the healthcare exchanges, it's usually cheaper and much less of a hassle to get your health insurance through your employer. It seems to me that this is a hard thing to compare before the interview/offer stage. However, it's all part of compensation as far as I'm concerned. In other words, it usually makes sense to take a salary cut for better health insurance or to ask for more salary (or equity, etc.) when health insurance options are worse, though how much of a cut/raise is going to vary based on a person's needs (i.e. healthy people are rarely visit the doctor aren't going to value good health insurance as much). The other option that might be possible in a small company is to ask for extra cash in exchange for not going on the health insurance plan. For example, if your company pays $5000/year towards your health insurance, they might be willing to cut a deal with you where they pay you $4000 if you _don't_ take the insurance (under Obamacare, they have to _offer_ a group policy, but it seems like doing this is fair game [1] as long as you have the option to be on the group policy). In practice, this option really only seems practical if you have a spouse or someone else who can put you on their health insurance plan, since individual plans are usually much pricier than negotiated group plans offered by employers. [1] http://obamacarefacts.com/questions/can-pay-employee-not-taking-health-insurance/ http://obamacarefacts.com/questions/can-pay-employee-not-tak...