COBRA is a disaster. its often more expensive than when shopping around for insurance by yourself.

Kinda sorta maybe. Yes you can get “cheaper” plans through private insurance but the trade off between lower premiums vs higher deductibles makes the equation a bit more complex.

That being said… yes cobra is usually insanely expensive. But that might be market rate for whatever “all you can eat low deductible” health plan your employer was offering.

You can often do better on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges.

its expensive, but that's how much your employer is paying for your health insurance.

The hidden costs keep growing and force people to keep jobs...just to have health.

But rest assured, this is a government problem that can be fixed.

If you take the employer payroll tax subsidy away, plus take mandatory healthcare insurance requisites and poof, this problems go away.

There would be tremendous disruption for sure, but we need to get away from "insurance for everything" when in reality it should be you have "insurance for disaster situations"

Or we could realize that we already have socialized healthcare, just in the stupidest most expensive way, at the ER (who can not refuse anyone service) and change it to a more effective way. No one is arguing that ERs should turn dieing people away, so we not only have it, but it's pretty much universally supported. Now we just need to agree to have it in a better form.