Buying Personal Health Insurance: How To Find The Plan Best For You

What is the best health insurance? This is question that many people just like you are asking themselves every day. How you answer that question really depends on what health insurance problems you want to solve. In other words, have you identified your specific insurance needs? It is important to understand that health insurance is not a discount off the price of health care. Insurance means risk management, and the monthly premium you pay is the price you pay the health insurer to take on the risk of your health care expense. One way of looking at this is that the company is making a bet that you will not need care. When the company pays the costs of your medical care, it has lost the bet, and you win in the sense that most of your expenses are paid.

Many people think that health insurance is a kind of price discount, but that is not true. Now that you know it is really a kind of risk management, you can see that there can be many kinds of plans to suit many different kinds of needs. If you have the money, you can even have an insurance company write a custom policy just for you. To keep costs down, health insurers offer set packages of benefits, and each package would include a slightly different menu of benefits. Normally, for many people, the term, health insurance plan, means something that pays for hospital and doctor care for either a single individual or for a family. Employer or union group health insurance is a policy offered through an employer or union to offer coverage for their employees. The kind of policy you choose, and the kinds of policies an employer makes available, depends on how much risk you want managed.

The search for health insurance plan information can seem overwhelming at first because there are so many plans, policies, and companies. Common well-known names that you might encounter could be, Cigna, Banker’s Life and Casualty, Blue Shield, Kaiser Permanente, Anthem Blue Cross, Tonik, Humana, Sterling, and the list goes on and on. These are all private insurance companies regulated by Federal and state insurance laws and all are in competition with each other. For that reason, you find that there are many different policies (or packages of health care benefits) and many different premium prices and cost sharing arrangements. In order for the policy you choose to work for you and your family, you must prioritize your health needs and then search for the company and policy that will give you the closest match. The company you choose then becomes the payer on your medical costs. In a private health insurance system, as exists in the United States, there can be many different payers because there are many different companies competing for your business.

Is there such a thing as single payer health insurance? The answer is both yes and no. In the United States the insurance program that most closely approximates a single payer is the Federal health insurance program for retired individuals age 65 and above. This program is called Medicare and became law in 1965. Although the government manages Medicare, it contracts with private insurance companies to handle the day to day operational logistics of administration. So you see, even though the government is the single payer, it still involves the private insurance industry. The Federal government has gone even further involving private insurance by creating the Medicare Advantage Plan program, which essentially allows private insurance payers to manage Medicare benefits through private, managed care plans.

Now, the issue of which health insurance is best for you is answered in part by what specific health care needs are in question. There are many different kinds of policies, and the choices can be overwhelming. For example, there is disability insurance, accident and dismemberment insurance, temporary health plans, continuation of coverage insurance, hospital only insurance, catastrophic coverage, disease specific, long term care, supplemental, and fee for service and managed care polices.

In order to figure out what health insurance will work best for you, it is important to list your costs, special needs, and any specific circumstances that need to be taken into account. For example, if you work in an environment where there is a high risk of injury, you may need a particular kind of insurance, such as a dismemberment policy. Another example would be industrial diving. Divers who risk decompression illness would need to be sure their insurance covers the expenses of a decompression chamber. For many of us, health insurance simply means coverage for basic doctor, outpatient, and inpatient care. However, making sure that you get the best low cost policy for you starts with an exact understanding of your health care needs.

Get more, easy to understand tips on finding the best low cost insurance plan!