I retired at 57. I paid aprox. $16,000/year for health insurance for me and my wife on my first year of retirement. Then I learned about health sharing plans. They are basically catastrophic plans with a few perks and the cost was $500/month (6,000/yr). With the $10k annual savings, I happily paid for any occasional doctors visits. Also, Quest offers services where you can get deeply discounted blood work which you can order yourself on line. Grassroots also offers this lab service. The health sharing plan I used was Medishare until I found Zion health share (http://www.zionhealthshare.org/), which was better. My income was over the limit for any meaningful healthcare.gov tax credit. The health share plans worked out well for us but we had no pre existing conditions and we are in good health. I am happily over 65 now and on medicare. The time goes by quickly!

Cost
 

Isn't over $1,400/mo premium rather high? Especially having to satisfy a $7,000 deductible?

It doesn't sound high to me.

Sure is. I had the same coverage (actually a $6,000 deductible) in NY for $325/ month. When I moved here in 2015 it jumped to $1,050/ mo and has been going up ever since

Not if you have to by insurance through Obamacare and don’t qualify for federal tax credit subsidies. Before Obamacare I was paying about $350 a month for excellent private insurance with a low deductible and max out of pocket. After Obamacare the monthly premiums skyrocketed along with the deductible and max out of pocket. Somebody has to pay for all the people getting free or highly subsidized insurance.

Obamacare went into existence in 2010. In 2010 the median price of a house was $158700. Today's house median price is $379100.

It was passed in 2010, and then slowly implemented. It wasn't fully in effect until 2016

And the increases in prices were immediate and very substantial.

The insurance plan I'm on now (FloridaBlue BlueSelect Silver 1443) retails at just under $2000 per month. Of course no one actually pays that much, but that's the MSRP for it. I'm charged $436/month for that plan.

It's $12,000 deductible (for the two of us) and $17,400 out of pocket (for the two of us). Our copays are 50% for anything that's covered but not preventative maintenance (which has no copay and no additional cost at all). Prescriptions are $30 each for a month's supply, so I don't bother and get mine at Walmart or Publix without going through insurance at all. Of course that also means that what I /do/ pay for my prescriptions doesn't count toward my deductible.

Last year wasn't nearly as bad, the deductible was lower, the out of pocket was lower, the premium was lower, and the copays were lower. But because hubby's social security checks kicked in, we had to deal with a thing called "cost sharing" and that blew us into a different level, which meant that ALL our costs increased. Not just the premiums (which went from a high of $84 to $436 within a window of two months - approximately a 500% increase even though our income level only went up around 40%), but all our medical expenses covered by insurance.

Welcome to the lower cost of living - where instead of just losing a few bucks out of your paycheck every week, you lose a crapton of money every month to pay for all the things that income tax would've covered. As long as you never get sick or injured, you can absolutely save a fortune in Florida. But god forbid you have an unexplained sneeze - hope you have a lot of money invested, in someone else's name, so the hospital can't take it from you.

That's not how it works. No one has to buy through the marketplace. Anyone can walk into a Florida Blue office, or call Cigna or United Health, and sign up for whatever insurance package they offer to the public. Individual plans are, and have always been incredibly expensive no matter where you are.

But now, if you DO go through the marketplace, you are guaranteed certain minimum of care: all vaccines are covered. All yearly checkups and yearly bloodwork is covered. Routine mammograms, pap smears, prostate exams, all covered. You can go bare-bones, and the law requires these plans, no matter how expensive or cheap, to cover these things 100% with no co-pay.

Private insurance is not obligated to cover those things, free or otherwise. If you don't qualify for ACA subsidies, then don't buy from the marketplace. The marketplace exists for the purpose of providing health care to people who qualify for subsidies and guarantee a minimum of health care to everyone who signs up for it.

It was never fully in effect. A huge and significant chunk of it was completely gutted and eliminated before it ever got to the President's desk. That's why it is the mess that it is now.

It would've been an amazing legislation. Now, it is helpful to those who qualify - but it's not nearly as good as it could have or should have been, and does cost people who don't qualify, more than it would have.

Medicare in some ways is a curse. Many of the drugs from Big Pharma, that you see on ads on TV for as low as $30, or $10, or $0 INTENTIONAL BLOCK MEDICARE PATIENTS.
The public doesn't learn this from anyone or the MSM. The MSM is too busy pocketing all the $$$ from Big Pharma ads. The truth is suppressed again.

Wow! With those prices, it looks like she isn’t going to retire any time soon! Social security wouldn’t even cover her medical costs.

You are both correct and totally wrong at the same time. You don’t have to buy your insurance through the marketplace if you don’t qualify for free or subsidized
Health insurance. That being said, the premiums for everyone not getting insurance through an employer are all dictated by the “affordable care act marketplace”, regardless of where you purchase the insurance. So where you actually purchase the insurance is simply a matter of semantics. The pricing for those who pay the full price for insurance got jammed down everyone’s throat to help pay for free and subsidized insurance.