Individual Health Insurance Plans
Individual health insurance plans are best for those of you:
- … whose employers don’t offer group health insurance.
- … who are self employed.
- … who are students.
- … who want medical insurance for their children only.
- … who find that adding dependents to a small business plan can be very expensive.
- … who are not eligible for free health insurance and have to find and pay for your own medical insurance.
Most health insurance plans in individual health insurance are some type of network based managed care health plan. Managed care programs try to reduce costs by:
- … providing incentives to physicians and patients for choosing lower cost alternatives.
- … reviewing the medical necessity of certain services.
- … sharing costs with the beneficiaries through deductibles, coinsurance, and co-pays.
- … implementing controls on hospital admissions and lengths of stay.
- … establishing cost sharing incentives for outpatient treatment.
- … contracting with providers to control the costs of healthcare.
Which type of individual health insurance is the best for you? Well, it depends on what benefits you feel you have to have and which benefits you feel you can live without. Comprehensive health insurance plans with rich benefits like low co-pays, no deductible, no co-insurance will most like have high monthly premiums. There are different types medical insurance plans to choose from. Most will fall into one of these categories:
- HMO – Health Maintenance Organization
- PPO – Preferred Provider Organization
- POS – Point of Service Plan
- HSA – Health Savings Account
- HDHP – High Deductible Health Plan
- EPO – Exclusive Provider Organization
The best way to lower your monthly health insurance premium is to reduce the level of benefits. For example: you could move to a higher deductible. If another company offer the same level of coverage for less then switch. As long as you are healthy and don’t have any pre-existing conditions then it is easy to get change insurance companies. Of course with the promise of health care reform this could all change but for the time being we don’t have anything else.
High deductible health insurance plans have significantly lower monthly premiums and can save you hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars every year. The trick is to find the balance, between your deductible and you monthly health insurance premium.
Deductible’s aren’t the only thing you need to look at, but it is a great place to start. Once you have gotten health insurance quotes from a few different sources you wantt to match up the health plans that have similiar levels of coverage:
- … deductible
- … co-insurance
- … co-pays
- … out of pocket maximum
- … prescription drug coverage
