Yes! You can afford quality health insurance
Affordable health insurance is available right now. You can make it happen if you understand that health insurance is meant to protect you from a crushing financial loss due to a big medical expense, not to pay for office visits, chiropractor sessions, or orthodontics.
What is Affordable Health Insurance
Affordable health insurance is also known as major medical insurance. Buyers of affordable health insurance self-insure the lower cost medical expenses that fall below the deductible of their plan. Yet they are protected from major loss by the maximum-out-of-pocket feature of their affordable plan health plan. Why pay the health insurance company a high premium when you could save the difference? Health savings accounts (HSA) enable individuals to use a tax-advantaged savings account to put money away in case it's needed to pay the deductible.
High Deductible = Great Value
Even though the high deductible on your affordable health plan may not be reached in a given year, the other benefit of health insurance is that you get big discounts on all covered expenses because you pay only the negotiated rates that the insurance companies receive from their contracted providers. The contracts that health insurance carriers have with physicians, hospitals, lab companies and other medical providers are very substantial. Hospital discounts often equate to 60% of charges, physician discounts can be 50%, and lab discounts can be 90% of charges. These are huge savings that a covered individual will enjoy, and an uninsured individual will not.
Negotiated Rates Help You Save Big
For example, the typical annual OB-GYN visit for someone who is not insured may cost $250 for the physician charge and $250 for the lab charge. That office visit with the insurance carrier's discount could be $50 for the lab charge and $100 for the physician, which represents substantial savings. In addition, many high deductible plans have preventive care for just a co-pay, and those exams could cost as little as $50 or, in some cases, nothing at all. This is a substantial savings over the $500 an uninsured individual would pay for the same services. In fact, this savings might even cover the cost of the entire health policy.
Maximum Out-of -Pocket Expense
The maximum out-of-pocket provision in your affordable health policy says that no matter what happens, the insurance company will cover all but a states amount, often $5,000 for individual coverage. There it is. In any given health insurance policy, you need only find what the maximum out-of-pocket expense to see clearly what your total exposure to medical risk is for that policy. Of course, you can subtract from that the savings you will realize in lower premiums.
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