Low Cost Health Insurance – What You Don’t Know Can Cost You

It’s often very hard to get a grasp on health insurance, and in fact many people will go through their lives, if they’re gainfully employed (and by that I mean employed by a company that provided insurance to its employees) without ever really knowing the fine details about their health insurance plans, the inner workings of that plan, and how they could actually save quite a lot of money if they’d just take the time to figure it all out.

Of course the insurance companies don’t make it very easy for you to understand all the mumbo-jumbo paperwork that they send you in the big, 5 pound, 8 X 11 envelopes that they send you every so often either. The reason may just be that if you knew everything about how the plan works, you may use that to your advantage and actually save some money.

But of course all of the blame cannot be put on insurance companies either. After all, it’s not their responsibility of how much homework that you do to understand their plans, it’s your responsibility. It’s actually your responsibility to both yourself, and to your family if you’re insuring them as well.

The fact of the matter is that these days, there is a couple – though admittedly not a whole lot – of ways for you to save additional money on insurance and enroll in various low cost insurance plans.

Actually the best and most used way of getting low cost health insurance is the old fashioned way, and that’s through your company that you work for. Your company most likely offers either an HMO plan, or a PPO plan. These are group plans, which save you money because of the sheer volume of people in the same plan; or group.

Most often you have little choice in whether you belong to an HMO or PPO plan because it’s chosen for you by your human resources department. Basically, with an HMO plan you’re pretty much stuck using the doctors within the confines of the plan or network, whereas with a PPO plan you have the choice with which doctor you prefer to use – as long as they will accept the type of insurance that you have (hence the actual name of the PPO; Preferred Provider Organization!)

You do pay for your increased independence however both in deductible and in fee’s such as co-pay. The HMO is definitely the cheaper choice. However, either way you look at it, both will cost you some money, but there are ways to offset this if you take the initiative. One of those ways is to use a Health Discount Plan along with your regular plan. This of course is easiest with the flexibility of a PPO, but they often work with an HMO as well. This is not insurance however, it’s just a way for you save with your regular plan.

A more complicated choice, but perhaps a better one for most is the Health Savings Plan, in which if you’re involved in an insurance plan that has a high deductible (the amount not covered by insurance that comes out of your pocket) you can obtain a tax advantage Health Savings Account which will allow you to make regular deposits into an account which is held specifically for medical bills and purposes. This is can be either an employee contributed deposit or fund, or an individually contributed fund. Of course there’s not nearly enough room in one article to elaborate on this, but if you’re paying out the nose on insurance deductibles in your current plan it may be something for you to look into.

A different plan that helps individuals to save in the event of a health emergency is Catastrophic Health Insurance. This usually has a low base fee to acquire but often has a high deductible, (usually around $2,000) – but keep in mind that any emergency trips that aren’t covered by your regular insurance is going to cost you well beyond that, and that’s just the ride to the hospital if you go by ambulance.

The trick to saving money and getting low cost health insurance is to know all of your choices, and knowing how each one works. Then, as you learn about each one, weigh the pro’s and con’s of each, then you can easily stack them together and be ultra covered so as to save as much as humanly possible in nearly any and all medical situations.

By: Bruce D Hunter