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Depends on age/health.

[/ QUOTE ]21, mostly fine, slightly high blood pressure.

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Not having health insurance is probably one of the dumber ideas out there.

[/ QUOTE ]Are you saying Bill Gates would be dumb if he did not have health insurance? There's obviously some income level you can have where health insurance becomes dumb to have, I'm just wondering what that point that is.

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A bankroll concept doesn't apply to this. A bankroll is a way of insuring against the risk of ruin. Theres no income generation in not having health insurance so there is no bankroll, nor ROR, in the way we think of it. There's no variance to limit.

[/ QUOTE ]Isn't the ruin you going broke because you can't afford the cost of a certain medical operation? The variance is like let's say you only had 25k to your name....health insurance covers everything from pills to some open heart surgery or something that range is like $100-50k or something, right?

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Ok, I suppose we could treat it that way if we want to say that each months payment is a gamble with a certain negative EV. The issue here isn't the positive or negative expectation, however. It's the variance, which is extremely extremely high. Would you play poker if the variance was 10 times higher, even if it was still a beatable game?

At a certain point the variance become so high that the ROR is 100% if you lose a single wager. Health insurance is a great example. Even if it's positive EV, there is a 100% ROR for any typical American for losing a single wager, so the game is not worth playing. I would say I wouldn't wager more of my income then I could lose without dramatically affecting my lifestyle.

A typical bad injury probably costs between 1k and 35k. So I would want to have an income where 35K is not a dramatic loss. Maybe a half-million a year after taxes could do it?

Note that Im looking at it backwards, IE, not having it is gambling. This might be a bad way to go about it, suffice it to say, the variance is a real bitch in high stakes low odds games.