Well, I've been back from the cruise for a few days but yes, I do take a lot of very attractively priced cruises!
As for medical care, I think somebody downtown figured out I'm wealthy. I received a notice from the healthcare.gov folks that said my 3 kids were denied medicaid (even though I applied using literally the exact same household stats and income as last year!). I submitted my 2017 tax form to the medicaid office and maybe that tipped "the system" off. I'm okay with that since I'm far from poor
Still waiting on the notice from NC Medicaid folks to make it official official.
I can't figure out how all this stuff works and I consider myself to have above median intelligence. My takeaway is that it sucks to be poor and unable to navigate the complicated systems we have for health care.
As I understand it, my $30 per month ACA premium will remain $30/mo when I add my 3 kids. The only slight downside is medicaid covered EVERYTHING and we never paid a penny to any service providers. Now we'll pay a little something for doc visits and dental visits. Though children's dental is still covered through our ACA plan. At least preventative. It's mostly rounding error in my financial situation anyway.
As for MMM's status, I don't think it's fair to analyze his pro forma income and expenses by including $30k in HI premiums AND saying there's no way he could fund that $30k/yr extra HI expense because he only had $800k saved at the time of retirement.
If he was actually living on the income stream from his portfolio, his income would be well below the ACA threshold and he would pay very little for HI after ACA subsidies. It's only because he makes $400k and therefore qualifies for no ACA subsidies that his premium is so high.
Moral of the story: if you retire (or "retire" for those that view it that way) and end up making a bunch of money, then your HI costs go up. But your income also goes up, so you're okay.
