Heath Insurance Book, Chapter 1, Section 7
T he remainder of this book is presented in a chronological order of the steps to get the best deal when purchasing your own health insurance. Each of the chapters are listed and briefly summarized below. Depending on your own personal preference or need you can either start at the beginning and read through the chapters as presented, or if you already have some knowledge regarding purchasing health insurance or have a particular question, read the chapters that pertain to you directly. I suggest that you read through once to become familiar with the entire process and then return to each chapter as you go through the health insurance purchasing process, with pen and paper in hand as you gather your information.
Sometimes it seems that the alphabet soup of insurance terms and abbreviations are only intended to intimidate you. In Chapter 2, you’ll get a quick review of the most important terms and some graphics to help illustrate the meaning of the terms for the “picture people”. Chapter 3 tells you the many places that you can get health insurance – and some of the characteristics of each place to get health insurance. Chapter 4 provides more terms related to the various features that you may encounter in plans while shopping, along with a way to keep track of features important to you.
Predicting your health expenditures is not an exact science, but it can be helpful to get an idea of what you’ve spent and then project that into the future, as explained in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 helps you to understand different types of health insurance – including individual or group, with comparisons between the various types.
Chapter 7 helps you to obtain the list of authorized insurers from your state and leads you through the process of narrowing down these insurers. Once you have the short list of insurers that meet your criteria, you can proceed to accumulate quotes and options from these insurers, as detailed in Chapter 8. This is where the most legwork is involved, as you gather information from each company, either directly from an insurer or through an agent. This chapter also shows a mathematical way to compare all the numbers provided – and a way for you to determine which company and plans to pursue further. After helping you to make a decision, Chapter 9 explains the process of applying for new insurance, and the steps that follow.
Chapter 10 provides tips to keep you from becoming the victim of the many rip-offs that exist in the health insurance marketplace. The appendices provide contact information and internet addresses for resources that you’ll need as you work through the steps in this book.
You’ll also want to keep up-to-date with additional information along with downloads and online tools from the website, www.BestHealthInsuranceBook.com.
Five Ways to Save Money on Health Insurance
1. Be at your healthiest. If you weren’t when joining, find out if you can reduce your premium by quitting smoking, losing weight, and exercising regularly.
2. Increase your deductible - Just like automobile and homeowners insurance, the rate goes down when the deductible goes up.
3. Remove unnecessary coverages. Drop things like vision and dental if you are not making use of them regularly.
4. Increase your copay. Changing from a $10 to a $20, $30, or $40 copay will bring down your premium.
5. Switch from a copay plan to one without. With copays the insurer is taking more risk. If you are willing to drop the copay and pay the office visit amount yourself (currently about $55 for the negotiated discount in my area), you can save money if you don’t visit the doctor frequently.
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