5.14.2008
Health Insurance Advice!!
Ok.. so me and J.D. are still looking for the right health insurance for us... and I am completely unintelligent when it comes to this sorta stuff! So what do you guys have?! Please feel free to give me the D.L.... Should we get something that covers maternity even though we probably aren't gonna have a baby for at least another year? Or should we wait til we are trying or what?! ahh... and does anyone know anything about the health savings accounts? good? bad? let me know! Your advice will be GREATLY appreciated!
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6 comments:
Oh Micah -- dickering over insurance is the pits! I do have advice, just no time to leave it right now...so i'll be back (or I'll shoot you an e.mail 'cause it might be lengthy.) Real quick, though, get lots of different price quotes from lots of different sources and let them bid each other down.
We have Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, it's great! My whole labor and delivery was covered! Still haven't got the NICU bill though. I think you should talk to Steph Chugg about this! She knows everything about insurance and they just did something cool through Aflac. I think she'd be the best to talk to. Sorry I'm not much help!
Hey girl! Sadly, I do work with health insurance stuff all day, gotta love it :) Yah trying to figure out insurance is no fun. Sky actually hasn't had insurance since October now since the jobs he had didn't offer it and we just haven't signed him up for his own plan. Luckily he's covered on our ICU Aflac plan so if something really bad happened he'd be covered but he's getting it through his new job here in the next couple of weeks so that'll be good. Anywho, I'm covered through my work and haven't really had to get insurance through my own policy. I assume you're looking for your own family policy, not through an employer or anything right? If you're getting your own policy, since your employer isn't paying for any of it it tends to be more expensive depending on what you get.
We shopped around for Sky a bit and it seemed like IHC (SelectHealth) had the cheapest premiums for the better insurance. They have a plan that only has in network benefits, which means that you can only go to certain doctors or facilities that are on your plan and that you can't see anybody else or it's not covered. That plan, in my opinion, would have been best for us right now because it had the cheapest premium (I think) and as long as you don't have a doctor that you love or go see regularly that's not covered by that plan (which we didn't) then that would have saved us money each month and it still would have been good insurance.
When you shop around, you want to look for a plan with the lowest deductible possible and the highest coverage possible. For example, the best insurance coverage would most likely be covered at 100% with no ded, that would be awesome. Unfortunately, there's not many out there I don't think especially if it's not through an employer. I have a $500 deductible with 80% coverage (which means that I'd have to meet my $500 ded before they'd start paying at 80%) so once my deductible's met, I would just owe 20% of whatever my insurance allowed for what I had done. That's pretty normal coverage for what most people have so if you find something around that or better, that's awesome. I personally wouldn't want to take the chance getting an insurance with a $1000 or $2000 deductible just in case something did happen cause then you'd owe a lot of money up front but it's totally personal preference. However, if you do get a high deductible plan, you I think you might be able to get a health savings account, although I'm not sure if insurances offer those for an individual/family policy, it might just be through people's employers that insurances offer those.
Okay, wow, this is getting long, but I hope it's helping :) A couple more things, I would want maternity coverage for sure, just to be on the safe side because you never know right? Hehe.. So make sure you ask when you're shopping around if they have separate deductibles for maternity because I know some insurances have like a separate $5000 deductible for maternity so if you ended up getting pregnant you would have to pay $5000 of the bill and if you weren't covered at 100% after that you would owe the other percentage as well. Medical stuff can add up as I'm sure we all know :( But in my opinion, maternity coverage is something that I would really want to make sure that I had.
Another option for maternity purposes is getting on Aflac a month or two before you start trying to get pregnant. Aflac is an insurance that pays you instead of the doctor and hospital so if you do end up with a big maternity bill, you can use the money that Aflac pays you to pay the bill. You can get Aflac both through an employer or just through you and JD. We have 4 plans through them that we got on and we'll end up getting a little over $3000 when we have the baby, $4000 if it's a c-section, and one of them's a sick-leave policy so it pays 70% of what I would have made while I'm on maternity leave. The ICU plan is the other one and it's awesome too. Then, once you have the baby, you can get off Aflac and get back on when you want to have another one, pretty cool stuff :) The plans that I'm on also cover other stuff too, for instance, I had a colonoscopy (TMI I know) but they paid me $500 since I had that done so it covers other hospital stays, etc. and it's pretty awesome!
So there's my two cents, sorry that was so long, hopefully it'll let me post this! :) You can seriously call me whenev if you have any more questions. You probably knew all that stuff but hopefully it'll help a little bit :)
That would probably be a good option, I haven't really ever looked into those so I'm not a big help in that area. If you never go to the doctor though I'm sure that would probably work for you. I'm pretty sure that some health savings accounts you have to use the money you've put into it by a certain date in the year so if you don't go to the doctor I wouldn't want the money to go to waste so make sure you look into that. That might just be a cafeteria plan that I'm thinking about through an employer but just make sure you find out a lot about it before you sign on the dotted line :) Good luck girl!! Sorry I wasn't much help with that :(
Hey Micah! This is Scott's wife. Cute blog! You really have to tell me how to make a cute header like yours! Its adorable!
I just went through all of this with me and Brock and it totally stinks. But my dad actually can write insurance policies and he knows all about it. He MADE me get maternity even though I just had a baby and was nursing because he said that with most companies it is really hard to add maternity to your plan later on. They prefer that when you start your policy you have it included, or sometimes they will say you have to be covered for a certain number of months before you get pregnant or something.
Anyway, it confuses me and I hate it, so I am sorry you have to figure it all out. I'm so glad my dad can help with it. He doesn't do it full time, he just does it on the side so he can help family and friends if they need it. You ever get really confused he is super nice and could clarify some things for you I bet.
Anyway, good luck!!
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