| Low Cost Health Insurance--Yes, It Is Legitimate And Here Is What You Need To Know |
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| Written by Max Logan |
| Thursday, 11 November 2010 11:34 |
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What are you buying when you purchase health insurance, and how do you know if you are getting a good deal? The answers to these questions depend on your understanding a few basic health insurance concepts. Don't worry, these are easy to grasp and well worth the time when you start shopping for the best, low cost health insurance. The point of this article is to help guide you through these basics so that you better understand what you are getting when you buy a health insurance plan.
What are you buying when you purchase health insurance, and how do you know if you are getting a good deal? The answers to these questions depend on your understanding a few basic health insurance concepts. Don't worry, these are easy to grasp and well worth the time when you start shopping for the best, low cost health insurance. The point of this article is to help guide you through these basics so that you better understand what you are getting when you buy a health insurance plan. When you buy health insurance, just as with any insurance, you are paying the company a monthly fee (insurance premium) to manage the risk of your need for health care coverage. The more risk the company assumes, the greater the premium. However, you as a consumer must understand what you are paying for, and you also have to be your own watchdog to some degree and pay attention that you get what you pay for. At its basic level, health insurance is the assumption of risk on the part of the company. Health insurance comes in many different forms. For example, there is disease insurance, accidental death and dismemberment insurance, catastrophic health coverage, COBRA insurance, and maternity coverage to name just a few examples. All of these, by the way, are kinds of health insurance. When you shop for health insurance you are generally presented with a variety of plans that offer different benefits and different levels of coverage. Insurance plans are the way the insurance is packaged. The plan is the "bottle" holding the wine, as it were. Some of the kinds of insurance plans most commonly sold are health maintenance organizations (HMOs), preferred provider organizations (PPOs), and private fee for service plans (PFFSs). The HMO, PPO, and PFFS are different ways of packaging benefits. That means that each kind of plan will pay for different kinds of services and each plan will have different payment rates. A payment rate is how much they will pay health care providers for their services. HMOs are usually less expensive but generally require you to get all of your care only from providers in the plan's pre-determined network of doctors and hospitals. In an HMO you would be assigned a Primary Care physician, and a referral from that doctor would be required in order to see a specialist. Quite often, HMOs work better for individuals who in relatively good health and whose medical needs are not terribly demanding. The PPO offers more latitude than an HMO. The PPO also includes a network of providers for plan members, but PPOs allow you to go out of the network for coverage, though going out-of-network is usually more expensive. The costs of PPO membership--the premiums you pay, for example--are generally more expensive than HMOs, but the level of coverage is often greater. PPOs do not require referrals to see specialists, though you do want to be sure that out-of-network providers accept the insurance and therefore accept the company's payment rate. Examples of national insurance offering PPO plans would include Anthem Blue Cross, Humana, Aetna, Cigna, Tonik, and Wellmark. A PFFS plan is still a kind of managed care, but in the private fee for service plan, you go to any doctor or hospital you choose as long as they submit claims to insurance company and accept payment. In a fee for service plan, your health care providers would bill the insurance company a specific fee for each service provided. What the insurer pays is based on a fee schedule. When you buy a health insurance plan, the actual cost of the plan is not only the price of the premiums, deductibles, co-pays and co-insurances. When you figure the real cost, you must also take into consideration the reliability of the company in living up to their promise of coverage for the kinds of services that are important for you and your family. Thus, a "cheap" plan could end up costing you more if the company doesn't cover the costs specified in the policy. Humana, for example, may offer you less expensive plans, but if you have to argue with them over meeting the basic agreements in the policy, then the coverage would be useless and the cost to you far greater than you had imagined. You can find cheap quotes for health insurance, but the key to a low cost plan is in coming as close as you can to paying only for a relatively few number of key services. In other words, if possible, you strip the policy of every service you can possibly do away with and assume as high a deductible as possible. Also, you must verify the reliability of the company because it's important that they pay promptly and without argument should a time of need arise. DISCLAIMER: This article is provided as information only and is not to be taken as financial advice. Free tips to help get cheap ppo health insurance and finding cheap health insurance for the family. |