Today, I want to talk about why your health insurance choices matter now more than ever. Whenever you’re tasked with all of a sudden having to figure out what health insurance plan is going to best meet your needs or your family’s needs, you really need to be sure you’re taking all the right matters into consideration. That’s how you can make the best decision right now for your family, as well as for your future.
Whenever I do strategy conversations regarding health insurance, I talk about your past history. I talk about your current situation. And we then take a look and see what could happen down the road that we need to be ready for.
Dealing With Today’s Health Insurance Market
Taking a broad look like this is really important in today’s market, especially with Affordable Care Act/Obamacare plans where the networks are very particular. They’re very specific. If the doctors you already work with are not in the network of your health insurance plan, you’re going to be pretty frustrated.
I always get a lot of people calling me in the middle of the year because they have doctors that don’t take their plan. This happens just because the proper planning wasn’t done during open enrollment or when they lost their coverage. Therefore, those are things that you’ve really got to pay close attention to because they can also cost you a lot of money if you don’t.
Let’s say your individual plan is an EPO, an exclusive provider organization. If you go out-of-network for your care, you won’t have coverage because in-network is really the only coverage you’ve got. To utilize your health insurance correctly, you’ve got to understand how these things work.
Selecting From Multiple Health Insurance Plan Designs
One of the other things I talk to my clients about is how to handle it when there are multiple plan designs available to you. Which one is going to best meet your healthcare needs? Do you need prescription coverage? Is that more important than, say, a high deductible? Or could the deductible be lower?
Therefore, you want to look at your own health. You want to see what your expenditure was over the last year, and use that to help you predict your needs. That will lead you to the right choice of a plan that suits you or your family.
Be sure that you’re using a professional like one of our staff here at MBhealth Insurance Agency because that’s what we do every day. We sit with folks. We talk with them. We find out about you and what you’re looking for, and we make sure that you choose a health insurance product that limits the surprises that you’re going to run into.
Sometimes I can’t deliver the greatest answer to a health insurance question, but having an answer does make it better. The unknown is really what makes choosing health insurance scary. At MBhealth Insurance, we like to try to remove that fear. Give us a call at (314) 544-5400 so we can help you make these choices easy.
