Trades work is hard on the body and the paperwork almost never accounts for that. If you are a sub, a one-truck operation or a small crew, nobody is handing you a benefits packet, and the plans you find on your own rarely answer the questions that actually matter in your line of work.
Losing prior coverage, moving, marrying or having a child opens a special enrollment period. Medically underwritten private plans are generally available year round. If you are uninsured right now, the priority is closing the gap, not finding the perfect plan.
This is the exact sequence we run. No portal maze, no call-center roulette, no quote and vanish.
Comp addresses injuries that happen on the job. It does not cover you at home, on the weekend, or for anything unrelated to work, and if you are a sub carrying your own policy the boundaries matter even more. Health insurance covers the rest of your life.
Knees, shoulders, backs and hands. That is the trades. How a plan handles imaging, specialist visits, outpatient surgery and physical therapy visit limits matters more to you than it does to an office worker, and those details are buried well past page one.
Trades income moves with weather and the pipeline. Marketplace subsidies are set on your projected annual income, so a strong spring does not automatically mean you fail the test. Project the year honestly rather than the best month.
Once you have even two or three employees there are options that are not available to a solo operator. Small group and defined contribution arrangements are worth pricing rather than assuming you cannot afford anything.
This is the single most common gap in the trades, and it is expensive when it goes wrong. Workers comp responds to an injury that happens on the job. It does not touch anything that happens off the clock, it does not cover your family, and it does not handle illness. A man who tears a rotator cuff moving his own furniture on a Sunday is in exactly the same position as anyone else without health insurance. If you are a sub who carries comp because a general contractor requires it, you may be carrying proof of insurance that does nothing for you at two in the morning.
There is a second version of this problem. Some tradesmen carry an accident-only or limited benefit product because it was cheap and it sounded like coverage. Those products pay fixed amounts for specific events. They are not built to absorb a surgery, a hospital stay or an ongoing condition, and they are marketed hardest to exactly the people who most need real coverage.
One call. Licensed producer, not a call center. If your current plan is still the better deal, I will tell you that.
Read the plan for what your body actually does. That means checking how imaging is handled, whether an orthopedic specialist requires a referral, what outpatient surgery costs you, and critically, whether physical therapy is capped at a certain number of visits per year. Recovery from a shoulder or a knee routinely runs past a low visit cap, and paying cash for the back half of a rehab program is a real and avoidable expense. These details rarely appear in a quote comparison. They have to be pulled out of the plan documents.
A roofer in the summer and a roofer in February are two different income situations, and the marketplace does not price you month by month. It prices you on the modified adjusted gross income you project for the whole year. That means the goal is an honest annual projection, not a snapshot of your best week. You can update the projection during the year as things change, and you reconcile at tax time. Getting this roughly right up front avoids both a surprise repayment and twelve months of overpaying.
Tell us your trade, whether you are solo or running a crew, what your health history looks like, and roughly what you expect the year to look like. We price the marketplace with and without a subsidy, we price medically underwritten private coverage, and if you have employees we price the group side too. You get a licensed producer, and the answer includes the parts of the plan that matter for physical work rather than just a monthly number.
No. Workers compensation responds to injuries arising out of employment. Anything that happens off the job, plus illness and your family's care, falls to health insurance. The two are not interchangeable and carrying one does not substitute for the other.
The same four doors any self-employed person has. Marketplace coverage with or without a subsidy, medically underwritten private coverage, or a spouse's group plan. Which is best depends on your projected income, your health history and your state.
Orthopedic and specialist access, imaging costs, outpatient surgery, and physical therapy visit limits. Those four items drive most of the real spending in physical trades and they vary widely between plans that otherwise look similar.
No. Subsidies are based on projected annual income, not a single month. Project the full year in good faith, update it if the year turns out differently, and reconcile at filing.
Yes. Once you have employees, small group plans and other employer arrangements become available and are often more workable than people assume. It is worth pricing rather than dismissing.
Under-65 coverage only. We do not sell Medicare.