Social Icons

Featured Posts

Choosing The Right Health Coverage

Monday, November 4, 2013

By Maryl Joop


The Affordable Care Act is designed to shift the industry to consumer driven health plans. Currently, health plans are based upon small pools, based on individual users, small business groups, or large businesses, as well as government-run groups. Some of these groups include military veterans, Medicare, Medicaid, and many others.

However, you can make the financial pain of medical needs less painful by choosing a health insurance plan with advantageous health care benefits. Here are a few tips to consider when selecting affordable health care that covers your needs. Assess your family's needs for prescription drugs. Are you or someone in your family on one or more medications daily? Look for an affordable health insurance insurer that has good prescription health care. Each of those medications could really add up unless you choose an insurer that helps accommodate this need.

The design of the Affordable Care Act is to provide affordable health insurance for all individuals in the United States of America. This is done by providing consumer driven health plans through online exchanges for those who do not have access to any credible health insurance.

It can allow you to use a Health Savings Account (HSA) to pay for medical expenses tax-free. A high deductible plan can give you affordable health insurance by saving hundreds of dollars in premiums and taxes. Be sure to save if you have a foreseeable medical procedure that will require you to pay your deductible.

These tax credits can amount to over $10,000 per family or individual, dependent on the situation of that person, the state they reside in, and other factors. This incentive was added to the Affordable Care Act to appeal to the middle class by making creating more affordable health insurance. One of the primary aims of the Affordable Care Act is to decrease costs that have, until recently, been spiraling out of control. Healthcare costs have increased annually since the creation of Medicaid and Medicare by over 8-16 percent, compared to the average annual inflation rate of 1-3 percent.

Term life insurance is a good idea when you want to pay as little as possible and invest the remaining money yourself. However, it's important to know that while payments for whole life insurance stay level until you pass peacefully away, term life payments only stay the same for a predetermined number of years, at which point the policy either terminates or the premiums begin to increase.

To put the onus of responsibility on the hospitals, payments like the Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments, Medicaid, Medicare and other payments from the federal government will be moved from a per service payment to a new form of payment. This form of payment is called capitated, as it estimates how many people the healthcare provider is expected to see, and pays the provider a flat rate fee for each of those individuals at the beginning of the year.

There are a lot of moving parts with most medical bills; one visit to the hospital can result in many separate bills from the doctors, the hospital, specialists, and more. If something doesn't look right be sure to call your insurer and discuss the claim to ensure that the proper billing is applied.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment