re: #773 engineer dog

how do their out-of-pocket expenses exceed 9.8% of their income?

if you are paying somebody, say $40k/yr, do they have to pay in more than $4k/yr as their part of your insurance plan?

Yep. Play with some numbers here:

healthreform.kff.org

That family of four would pay $1,982 if they were in the exchange the rest would be paid as government subsidy. They pay about $6000 now. Also, keep in mind entry level jobs tend to have lower salaries and tend to be single unmarried people. Some would pay a bit more, some a bit less, but on the whole most would pay less. And families would pay on average a lot less.