Health insurance is a must-have in the event you have a serious medical emergency. You never know when disaster will strike in the form of illness, accident or injury. If you aren’t prepared with a good health insurance plan, you could stand to lose everything. If you have a good health plan in place, you can rest easy that your expenses will be taken care of. You have a couple of choices when it comes to purchasing health insurance. You can go with an individual plan, or if your employer offers group insurance, you can save money by choosing that plan.
Your first step in acquiring a new health insurance package should be crunching the numbers and coming up with a rough estimate of the total costs involved. Co-pays, premiums, and deductibles can be difficult to grasp, so add everything up to see all the costs prior to buying the insurance.
Pay attention to which prescriptions are covered under your policy. Health insurance companies tend to change the medications they cover, so see to it that you read the contract’s fine print each time you re-enroll. If a pill that you take every day is suddenly no longer covered, it may be time to search for a different insurance company.
Catastrophic Coverage
To save money on your health insurance premiums, opt for catastrophic coverage rather than comprehensive. Catastrophic coverage only covers major medical expenses, like hospitalization and emergency surgeries; in comparison, comprehensive covers that, plus most minor health care related costs like physicals and prescriptions.
You can utilize health insurance in order to pay less taxes. It’s common for people not to know that health insurance premiums are tax deductible. Health insurance premiums, prescription costs, deductibles and other expenses not covered by insurance may be deductible on your tax return. State taxes differ than federal, so you may want to check those guidelines.
Expect your health insurance policy to have loopholes in it. Read the policy through and through, so you know what it does and doesn’t cover. Be prepared beforehand to pay for certain things out of your pocket, such as certain medicines or treatments.
Regardless of the type of health insurance you have, you’ll save a lot of money by opting for generic drugs over their name brand equivalent. In very rare circumstances a generic won’t be available to you. Generics have been proven to be as effective as any name brand.
You need to find out which health insurance company and plan is best suited for you. Different options that you are going to have are POS, PPO and HMO. Each of these options offers different features and benefits, so you must compare each plan before agreeing to pay for coverage. Make sure that you’ll be able to keep your doctor if you want to.
Make it a point to find out which prescriptions are covered by your health insurance. The list is updated annually, and if you take expensive prescriptions, you should ensure they’re still covered before you re-enroll.
If you plan to have a baby soon, you should find a healthcare plan that will cover all expenses relating to your pregnancy, labor and delivery. You need to know this because there are health insurance plans that don’t cover all parts of pregnancy and labor.
Since it’s cheaper to do a group plan, your employer rate will be cheaper than a personal insurance plan. The best way to get around this is to become a member or a trade organization that has insurance available to its members.
Health Insurance
When looking at group and individual insurance plans side by side, the differences are obvious; group insurance might be cheaper, but individual insurance offers more choices. The key to health insurance is always having a policy in place. Being without health insurance in this day and age is leaving a door open for trouble. You never know what could happen, and just one visit to the emergency room can cost thousands of dollars, not to mention the cost of a hospital stay for serious injuries or a lengthy illness. Be smart, and research health insurance today.