Health Insurance Options?
5DISCLAIMER: I am not looking for political opinions.
The husband’s new job doesn’t offer health insurance. I thought we had it figured out through the co-op we have all our other insurance through but the price they quoted online was $500 per month and the contract they sent was $1,700 per month. (They claimed it was due to medical issues with the husband and one of the kids.) So, I am wondering if anyone else who is self-employed or responsible for their own insurance has any suggestions? Thanks for experienced advice!
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Check Sam’s club. I found them to be a cheap source when my company didn’t cover insurance
It’s roundabout, but I’ve had friends take a few college classes to qualify for their group plans. Our local college at least had a pretty reasonable group plan, and you only had to take 2 classes per semester to qualify. My friends just took a couple of interesting evening classes.
@moondrake I’ve heard of this. Also heard of people who work at… I think it’s Costco (?) For a few hours a week because they offer P/T healthcare at a very reasonable premium.
@moondrake @tnhillbillygal Another benefit of college classes: you get a .edu email address, which qualifies you for the student rate on Amazon Prime. If you tell them when you sign up that you’ll be in school for five years, it renews, even if you don’t take any more classes. You only need the email when you sign up.
@moondrake @OldCatLady @tnhillbillygal
If it’s a university system that hasn’t switched over to Gmail, you might also get the Microsoft home use program as a benefit. Getting a copy of office for $10 is pretty sweet…
Health insurance for those employed at larger corporations is staggeringly expensive per person. Even with the large Corp ability to negotiate with insurers. Insurance is just expensive. Esp without price controls or other price protective regulation, other than those dictated by Medicare and the marketplace.
$500-800 per person per month (for adults - I don’t know about children costs) does not sound out of line what I have heard. In fact it sounds cheap
Shop around. Do a lot if reading - you need to understand what you are buying and the pros and cons.
Check it the ACA website for cost comparisons.
If you can join professional organizations, sometimes those offer health insurance options. Sometimes not.
Go to your state insurance regulations website. Sometimes they offer options.
I know of families where one person holds a weekly 32+ hour horrible job, just to get family insurance coverage. Even then, the monthly for extra family members is very expensive.
If someone works full time for a hearhcare provider, that’s often one way to get quality insurance. Tho nothing is ever cheap.
You may not find a good solution to this.
Student and short term policies are cheaper, but come with their own sets of problems and limitations, which can be serious issues in themselves.
Decent individual policies and single family policies at any kind of affordable rate (for the non-rich) prob no longer exist.
@f00l
PS
Sometimes various county hospital systems offer low cost healthcare.
However, often these come with the requirement that any individual accepted into the program have purchased either a group health policy or ACA (healthcare.gov?) policy.
Sometimes county employees doing applicant intake into the subsidized country system can offer excellent localized advice on what is available to you. Worth checking.
Don’t count on much in the way of savings tho.
Along those I know who can’t get subsidized coverage one way or another, health insurance monthly premiums are usually a larger monthly cost than the total cost of their residence (rental or mortgage); unless they own outright.
The options are often very painful. I hope you find something.
@f00l It is really expensive!
At my new corporate health job job, our 2-person health insurance premium is going to be approx. $1200/mo- but at least it’s pre-tax money.
My last job was at a hospital health system where when I started there, I got a top of the line health insurance, and yet saved $11 K in premiums as compared with the radiology group I left.
As a small bizness, they had an expnsive, but low-featured Chamber of Commerce-based plan.
Of course, it figures, 'cause about 2-3 months after I left- they merged with a larger hospital/health system, and got an even bigger cut in premium costs than I did at the smaller hospital.
@PhysAssist It’s crazy how much it can vary from company to company, and sometimes even within a company! Several years ago I worked for one of the big defense contractors and had a team ‘assigned’ to me purely for paperwork purposes because they needed a ‘senior’ warm company body on site to own the paperwork side. Well my family coverage at that time cost me about $400 a month, but this new team’s benefits were totally different, their individual medical plan ran $1,200 a month, and their pay rate was $15/hr. In the first month one of them gave up their desk job because they got a better offer…at McDonald’s.
@CKizziar Been there, seen that, declined the T-shirt.
Imma just going back to medicare B tired of fighting with call center clerks.
@cranky1950
Are they cranky?
@f00l Nah just costly and frustraing. I’m cranky.
I have great insurance through my employer and it used to be cheap – but it’s expensive as hell any more.
I pay $550/month for my family of 5. My employer pays $1600/month on top of that). 3 people costs the same as any number beyond that, so I’m sure some larger families benefit from the pricing plans.
I really wish it wasn’t so expensive. I swear if I wasn’t afraid to die of some cancer or other disease or be involved in some serious accident, I’d consider a Cobra plan.
@capguncowboy
Wow. That seems fortunately inexpensive, to my possibly naive eyes.
My SIL paid I think around $1000/month for a major-medical personal policy (covering herself only) in the final year before she became eligible for Medicare.
She did shop around to get even that price. Shopped both professional trade group policy offerings, and the ACA offerings.
@capguncowboy @f00l Oh my gosh that is cheap. I am paying $540/mo for just me COBRA and was paying (In 2017) $1119.19/mo, again, just for me with individual health insurance.
PS COBRA is what you have after you leave an employer and pay the employee, employer and an administrative fee for continuing employer coverage for 18 mo past your separation date.
@capguncowboy My employer also pays over $1,000/month for my health insurance. It’s bananas.
@capguncowboy Definitely not expensive as hell. I pay around $340/month just for myself and I work for a hospital owned by a company that runs about 120 hospitals. I’m sure their quantity discount is substantial.
@capguncowboy @cinoclav
And those are the magic words.
For good, inexpensive or well-subsidized health insurance through work, be employed by a large and prosperous medical care provider, or be a civil servant employed by the federal government, or another government body that offers excellent health insurance for employees.
@capguncowboy @f00l Tbh, my insurance isn’t that spectacular. The co-pays are kind of ridiculous. My point above though was simply that $550 for 5 people is a great deal considering I’m paying $340 just for myself.
@cinoclav @f00l
I suppose it’s not too bad in regards to what I’m seeing here. It’s easy to forget how good you have it until you look around to remind yourself.
My contribution has doubled over the past 6 years and my coverage is less than before and my deductible is higher too. I browsed the offerings on a few sites and even still, my coverage is better than what is offered elsewhere.
@capguncowboy @cinoclav @f00l
Being a state/fed gov’t. employee definitely makes a difference. My husband is a state Correctional Officer and the insurance plan we chose was more expensive than the others offered, but there’s no deductible, $15 pcp copays, $30 specialist copays, and they pay 100% after we pay our copay as long as we stay in network and I’ve never had an issue finding someone in their network.
Our monthly cost for health, vision, dental, and pharmacy is $304 for our family of four. His employer’s cost is $1367. They even buy me new hearing aids every three years at no cost to me. My daughter has been getting immunotherapy for her allergies for a couple of years. We do have to drive about 45 minutes for an in-network allergist, but they pay for the shots 100% and we just pay copays twice a year for her appointments there.
If anyone is looking for work, I’d highly suggest looking into corrections. They are all severely short staffed, and as long as you aren’t in a state where it’s all been privatized, the healthcare should be pretty decent.
On the exchange (full price as I didn’t make enough for a subsidy and MS had not expanded medicaid) and individual health insurance off the exchange, I found in MS, were within $30/mo of each other. They are NOT allowed to consider medical history, just age. Now plans that are coop type things or other “exceptions” manage to do an end run around those rules, as does the “short term”, 11 mo max, policies.
I was paying $1119.19/mo for insurance for me alone (BC/BS in MS, off the exchange so I could go anywhere rather than be limited to 4 counties). COBRA from my job that ended May 15 (state insurance in AR) is $540/mo. Again just for me.
I presume you have checked the exchange prices and the “regular health insurance company off the exchange” prices.
Some people I know have used religious coop style programs but those reply on people actually following through with sending you their money. In my opinion that might be a bit risky.
It’s so much depends on where you live.
It can be worth going to a broker who sells for various plans.
Kaiser, if you live near one, even for private is fairly often the least expensive.
When my daughter came off my health plan nearly 20 years ago, we shopped around a lot, used a broker and saved more than you would think.
Thank you all for all the input and being so kind. We are looking on the exchange now and I think I am going to go with an adviser listed on their site so I don’t screw this up. I am afraid I’ll do something dumb and get the wrong thing. There is one listed at a medical group the next town over and I sent an email asking if I could meet with her before open enrollment starts. I will be pouring over information before then to make the most educated decision I can. I’d like to keep it under $600/month if I can. Hubbie is thinking about changing jobs again just to be able to go through an employer for insurance. So many decisions to be made. Again, thank you.
@tnhillbillygal
Please don’t pour coffee on your paperwork
Damn English 
@compunaut The way I felt this morning, I could have burnt the midnight oil with them.
@tnhillbillygal be sure you take into account the deductible and out of pocket. If you have a “typical” year for medical expenses and so know roughly what you spend each year that will help.
Make an excel spreadsheet.
You want to look at not just monthly cost of each but also annual cost of premiums of all the plans you are looking at.
Then make a column of your “usual” out of pocket expenses for medical crap you typically have each year. For example I usually run up 2500-3800/year at MD Anderson Cancer center and about $1800 -3800 on top of that at a minimum (and some years my total runs the max out of pocket of $7250).
Then look at the deductible and out of pocket max for each. Add that to the annual premium total. That gives you worst case for annual costs.
Then if your usual annual out of pocket costs are LESS than the max out of pocket for a plan, you might be better off financially paying more in premiums for less in deductible, knowing you won’t reach the out of pocket max. OR less in premiums for a higher out of pocket max knowing you likely won’t reach it. You won’t know for sure until you run the numbers for different possibilities. On the other hand if you know you will max it out then the best deal depends on premiums plus the max cost of the out of pocket/deductible.
What you need to do is play with the numbers and different “what if’s” (that is why an excel spreadsheet works well because then you don’t have to do all the math yourself) and see which plan, in the end, will cost you the least. One year I found for me that paying the highest premium actually cost me less in the end because it had a lower out of pocket max and I knew I’d max that out and have a ton more in expenses beyond that which would then be “free”. Another year it was the third most expensive program that would, when comparing apples to apples with my projected expenses, would cost me the least.
I just ran the numbers for someone for medicare plan G vs F with the companies they preferred. F pay the medicare deductible and G does not. They are otherwise identical. Well if they got F they’d have higher premiums than with G. BUT G annual premiums + deductible was about $278/less than F’s annual premiums with one company, about the same with another, less with a couple of others and more with a couple. Thus getting G would save them money because they had enough medical issues that they knew they’d be blowing through all the deductible and of the G’s they went with the cheapest despite me telling them it would be worth checking into complaint rates; that paying to be with a company that wasn’t riddled with complaints would reduce their aggravation level and that can be worth paying for.
BUT you also have to pay attention to what insurances your preferred doctors and facilities accept. Call around to those places and get their lists. We have two major medical centers where I just moved back to that don’t accept ANY on exchange health insurances (nor medicaid for that matter).
@Kidsandliz @tnhillbillygal Yes to all of this, especially that last part! We thought we did well on researching our plan options and choosing the high deductible option through my employer. We did this knowing we’d be having our baby this year, alas we were wrong. The hospital was in-network, and the stay ate up the rest of my wife’s individual deductible. Of course nothing out of pocket above her deductible applies to the family deductible, so my new daughters $2,200 hospital bill is all out of pocket, but then came the surprise that neither the anesthesiologist nor the anesthesia CRNA at the hospital were in-network. Completely separate (and double) deductible for out-of-network providers, and of course no negotiated rates. So those two get another $4,200 and $1,400 respectively for their hour of service. Research, research, research, and when you think you have all the information you need, ask another thousand questions.
@CKizziar @Kidsandliz @tnhillbillygal
Yup, that was a shocker for me too. When my first child was born we were hit with a pediatric hospitalist bill out-of-network. The hospital was in network and where my ex worked - you can’t control who is treating within the institution, but if the hospital is in-network all services within it’s walls should be also. I do not think it is fair that you can be charged with out-of-network billing. It’s just fucking wrong.
@CKizziar @Kidsandliz @mfladd @tnhillbillygal
Some people have bracelets and wearable signs made up that decline treatment from out-of-network care providers in the absence of a current emergency.
Some hospitals ignore these.
My father was self-employed some time and also found the exchange simply too expensive. He ended up looking at Kaiser (if they are in your area) and at the local county-run plan (my county is large enough to offer this service). Check into these options? Health insurance sucks and it’s crazy expensive these days.
@Collin1000 Don’t do ya much good if you want to spend 8 mos a year living in the desert.
@Collin1000 @cranky1950 Move to a county in the desert. I spend 12 mos a year living in the desert.
I have Medicare A & B, but I also keep a full BCBS policy, because I do not trust this administration with my life. My monthly BCBS premium is $160. on a plan for federal employees and retirees.
You should check out a “Medi-Share”. I know it’s become very popular among those who don’t have insurance available through their workplace. I heard a discussion on the radio about a town in Kansas who was offering a similar option, but was open only to residents of the town…
Not sure where Christianity fits into your life, but this particular one is a faith backed organization (from the website https://mychristiancare.org/medi-share/)
“With Medi-Share, there’s an option for every budget. Each household’s monthly share is based on the age of the oldest applicant and how many family members are participating, and there are seven Annual Household Portion (AHP) options available, ranging from $1,000* to $10,500.”
@tohar1
These can work well for some very tightly knit, strongly responsible, info-and-life-sharing communities like the Mennonites.
I don’t know how well these will work for groups where personal standards of financial conduct are less rigorously enforced, and personal conduct of group members is less transparent.
History?
@f00l IMHO your example is exactly why “regular” insurance is so expensive. There are quite a few of these sharing co-ops available, some based on faith, geographical area, trades, etc. They are only as good & soluble as their membership. I cannot remember the doctor who was on the radio, but I listened to him for over an hour, and was just fascinated by how successful his community based medical share program was. Truly run as a non-profit, and any excess funds collected were returned to the members of the community. Just FYI: my family does have Blue Cross/Blue Shield for insurance, but I have a feeling that if for any reason I lost my coverage, I would be inclined to look into a program such as “Medi-share”.
@f00l @tohar1 Do you suppose Canada accepts USA citizens as health care political refugees? The Netherlands wasn’t bad either. The UK’s system came in a distant 3rd.
@Kidsandliz @tohar1
Either will accept well-heeled US citizens as residents.
If you don’t have financial resources … Dunno.
Reading something (not related to this thread) this morning it looks like Sam’s Club and Costco appear to sell health insurance - at least according to that article.
Hubbie decided to take a job with another employer who offers health/dental/vision coverage. We hate to change jobs again but will be the best option for us at this time. It has been a stressful week.
@tnhillbillygal
Your are far from the only family or individual who was forced to make this sort of choice.
Am employer who doesn’t offer at least a tolerable health insurance option is going to not get some of the best potential employees. Way too many people (all the middle class, for instance) can’t afford to shop the individual market.
I hope the new situation goes well for you.