I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
$40,000 per child: My healthcare nightmare as an entrepreneur
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Why Am I Paying $40,000 for the Birth of My Child?Published on November 30, 2025 My third child arrives in a week. The cost? $40,000. Out of pocket. Cash. Not because something went wrong medically. That's just the price of admission for a self-employed entrepreneur who wants to grow a family while running a small business in America. $25,680 in annual premiums + $14,300 deductible = the privilege of bringing a new taxpayer into this world. I wrote about this because Michael Green's viral essay about the "$140,000 poverty line" struck a nerve. His core insight: the participation costs of American life have spiraled completely out of control. And there's no greater participation cost to civilization than reproduction itself. In the post, I break down:
The economists debunking Green have no answer for me. None. Because their charts don't reflect reality at the till. A society that makes it this hard to have children is a society that has decided it doesn't want a future. I'm fighting for mine anyway. |
Aaronontheweb
I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
Stop Failing The `git clone && run` Test Published on October 17, 2025 in 10 minutes to read I’ve done a ton of consulting as part of my work at Petabridge over the past 10 years and I run into developer onboarding problems constantly with new clients. It takes much longer than it should to clone a customer’s application from source control and successfully run it. Continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) get a ton of attention in the DevOps space, but improving the “first...
Your HTML Comments Are More Powerful Than You Think: Building Custom Validation Grammars with HtmlAgilityPack Published on October 1, 2025 in 20 minutes to read We were getting ready to redesign and simplify phobos.petabridge.com - our Akka.NET observability platform documentation site. The plan was to remove a bunch of old pages, restructure the information architecture, and redirect everything properly so we wouldn’t break any inbound links from Google, Stack Overflow, or the blog posts...
There Has Never Been a Better Time to be a Junior Developer - And It Won't Last Forever Published on August 22, 2025 in 11 minutes to read Everyone in tech is convinced that AI will eliminate junior developers first. “Why hire a junior when AI can write code?” they ask. The prevailing wisdom is that entry-level developers are most vulnerable to automation. They’re dead wrong. I wrote “The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste” a few months back and that’s still...