Buying Affordable Individual and Family Health Insurance
How to Buy Affordable Family Health Insurance
When it comes to buying family health insurance, knowledge isn't power, but it helps. It is important to know right from the start that no personal health insurance policy exists that will cover all your health care costs; the closest you can come to this ideal state is the group insurance coverage provided by some large corporations or the restrictive but comprehensive coverage of a health maintenance organization (HMO). What you are more liable to have to deal with is the fragmented and patchwork coverage of various types of policies.
Family Health Insurance Policies differ in two ways: what they cover and how they make payments. They may cover a large proportion of your health costs or only a small fraction. A policy may pay the health care provider directly, or it may pay you. Generally speaking, a policy that pays the provider offers more complete coverage. A policy that pays you directly is more liable to pay a flat sum only for very specific items, without reference to actual costs.
Personal Health Insurance ABCs—How to Read a Policy
Both the federal and state governments have been working hard over the past few years to encourage the health insurance companies to write their personal health insurance policies in simpler, clearer language that is able to be understood by any reasonably literate person and to set their policies in a reasonably large size of type (no more small-print clauses you have to read with a magnifying glass).
The improvement has been considerable, but even so, policies are hard to understand because many of the terms are either not used in everyday life or have taken on specialized meanings. Before we get into a discussion of actual policies and coverage, therefore, we thought it would be a good idea to familiarize you with some of the basic terms you will encounter. In our blog posts we will see what to look for under these terms.