"The rich should pay more in Social Security taxes."
They already do. Besides paying at least $14,860 dollars a year in FICA, most "rich people" are employers and thus pay half of their staff’s employment taxes.
How to fix social security? Extend the minimum age for benefits. It’s not reasonable to assume today’s workers need to support yesterday’s workers for 1/3rd of their lives.
About the only downside to being self-employed is the lack of health insurance. For some reason, US insurance companies decide to give decent rates to large groups and gouge individuals and small businesses. Car insurance isn’t like this, they just gouge young people (possibly the reverse of what health insurance should do?) and unsafe drivers.
I found my policy through health.yahoo.com, as lately I have been plugging in what I am looking for dot yahoo dot com and find a great resource. However, as of this writing it appears they have changed the site and I don’t see the health insurance search feature. It was powered by eHealthInsurance which is just as easy to go to.
The papers were all filled out online which made everything easy. I appear healthy enough, most likely because of my age, that they didn’t send anyone out to poke and prod.
If you’re looking for a policy, I suggest going the same route. I got a good price and the convenience could not be beat.