Best Health and Dental Insurance for Self-Employed?

I was wondering when you said your husband "just has a health spending account" but has no dental. He must have a fairly restrictive employer because generally health spending accounts allow the employee to spend their annual amount on any medical services they want.

In your case there are really just two options:

1) a plan similar to what you had at Manulife. Those plans collect a premium up front and then limit what you can claim so they still make a profit. It is calculated over thousands of people so they can lose money on a few large claims yet still make their profit by restricting the claim payouts of the vast majority. Spreading the risk by making many people pay small amounts to cover a few people for large amounts is how insurance works.

2) a health spending account where you don't pay any premiums beforehand but pay for the cost of the health service plus the fixed 5% profit for the plan administrator. For a single family business such as yours, you save by using "before tax" dollars to pay the health costs rather than "after tax" dollars. This will save you about 20-30% of the health costs. There are multiple threads on this forum referencing a low cost provider Brock Health. With your own health spending account, you would naturally create a very generous plan compared to your husband's employer.