Health Insurance

5 Ways to Cut Your Health Insurance

By Kevin M

Last week we examined 11 Ways to Cut Your Car Insurance–this week we’ll flip it around and take a look at what we can do to lower our health insurance costs. This one is even bigger—in many households, health insurance costs are second only to housing as the top expense. And many times the difference between housing and health insurance isn’t all that much.

Raise your deductible and co-pays

Raising your deductible and cutting co-payments is the most common and probably the most effective way to cut your health insurance. In fact you can reduce your monthly premium by hundreds of dollars with just this one step.

As an example that I’m pulling from one of my own recent posts on this site:

“…coverage for a family of four living in Georgia (male, 40, female, 39, two children, non-smokers) with a deductible of $2,000 and $35 co-pays for doctor visits will be $863 per month (via Assurant). If the deductible is increased to $10,000 and the $35 doctor visit co-pay is eliminated, the monthly premium falls to $295.”

Increasing the deductible from $2,000 to $10,000 is admittedly extreme, but it illustrates the point clearly—the premium falls by nearly 70%. You can achieve significant savings even with smaller increases in your deductible. This is something you might consider doing if you are in good health and not a frequent user of healthcare. If you have health issues and regularly use healthcare, you’d be better off staying with the low deductible.

If you do raise you’re deductible, you can offset the risk with one or more of the following:
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There IS Affordable Health Insurance IF You Know Where to Look

Guest Post by Timothy L. Barnes, CLU

This post is Tim’s response to my post of June 17th, The Self-Employed Health Insurance Dilemma. As a Chartered Life Underwriter, Tim wishes to point out that there are affordable health insurance options for the self-employed–and for nearly everyone else–if you know where to look and are prepared to make necessary trade-offs.–Kevin M

In the 1939 classic, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Frank Capra illustrated thatWashingtonD.C. had already become a place where politicians were willing to spread lies and misinformation to serve their own desire to hold onto power.

Nothing has changed in the last 60 years. Politicians have used the media to spread rumors about health insurance that are not entirely true. The only difference is that in 1939 the media was dominated by newspapers. Today, politicians prefer to smile in front of TV cameras.

The people called “journalists” in 1939 are now called TV anchors. Just like the “reporters” in the 1930s, TV news tells stories that will result in more advertising dollars. Newspapers before World War II and TV stations today honestly tells stories but with their own agendas in mind.

Most recently, politicians and pundits have told Americans that they need to be scared by the high cost of health insurance. They are using the classical political trick that Michael Douglas exposes in “The American President.”

They are,

Telling Americans what to fear.
Telling Americans who to blame.

“That is how you win elections!”
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The Self-Employed Health Insurance Dilemma

By Kevin M

Health insurance coverage has become a national concern, but no where is the issue quite as close to home as it if for the self-employed. An employee may be concerned with the size of his premium contribution, or with co-pays and deductibles. The self employed business person has those concerns too, and a whole lot more. Like how to pay a premium that’s the size of a house payment but isn’t subsidized by an employer. Or even whether or not he can get any coverage at all.

There’s a lot of debate on health care, but we should expect no true reform and certainly no salvation in the foreseeable future. All of the schemes being devised center on how to maintain funding mechanisms to support the current over-priced system, or to trim “administrative costs” at the fringes. None of them get to the core of the issue, which is that the efforts at greater funding have lead to a system of perpetually higher costs

At some point, the healthcare system will blow up—a la the mortgage meltdown—and then perhaps crisis will break the cost spiral in a way that decades of putting tape and glue on the status quo couldn’t. In the meantime, what do you do to deal with what has become for the self-employed, an almost malicious system?
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Health Savings Accounts (HSA) – Can They Help You?

By Art Forrest

A few months ago I went to get an oil change and wound up hanging out all morning while they did other things to my car – truth is I know as much about nuclear warheads as I do about the inner workings of my car, but it was the kind of stuff that gets old and has to be replaced when you hit 80,000 miles or so.

It cost me around $500 and, get this, my auto insurance didn’t pay a dime! Are you stunned? Of course not.

My auto insurance, like yours, is there in case I have a wreck. What if I could sell you an auto insurance plan that would allow you to pay a $35 “copay” every time you had to get some work done on the car, and maybe gave you a couple oil changes for free each year? What do you suppose that would cost?

How to Buy Health Insurance Without Paying Too Much

By Art Forrest

The recent (and ongoing) health care debate has illustrated how expensive health care is, regardless of whether it’s financed by insurance premiums, higher taxes by the government, or cash out of your pocket. It’s important, then, for both individuals and small & large businesses to choose the most appropriate and cost effective coverage for their needs. Here are a few general comments and things to think about…

Health INSURANCE vs. Health Care FINANCING

Most health insurance plans are health care “financing,” NOT health care “insurance.” Insurance is, by definition, the pooling of risk for an unexpected financial loss–like your house catching fire or a tree falling on your car during a tornado, or, health-wise, having heart surgery for $145,000.

What to do if You Absolutely Can’t Afford Health Insurance

Emergency Entrance by taberandrew.

By Kevin M

Let’s get this point out of the way upfront: everyone should have health insurance. We all know this without anyone emphasizing the point. But with job losses in recent years, companies canceling their coverage, and the cost of independent plans spiraling out of control, millions of people have been forced to drop coverage in favor of just surviving.

If you’re one of them, or think you might be in the near future, here are some suggestions that might help in the event that you absolutely can’t afford a traditional health insurance plan. One or a combination of several may at least partially offset the loss of the typical $1000-plus per month plans that cover all of the things we’re used to.

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