Private Health Insurance Quotes
If you are looking for private health insurance quotes, then there are a number of things you will need to consider:
1. Unlike health insurance plans that are sponsored by an employer, you are entirely on your own to pay the full price of the monthly insurance premiums. You do not have the benefit of an employer subsidizing a portion of the monthly premium fees, and then having your share of the premium payments being deducted from your paycheck with pretax dollars. Therefore, as a result, the amount of money that you pay for your monthly premiums is paid for entirely out of pocket with after-tax dollars. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of seeking private health insurance quotes. You lose the tax benefits. (The only way you can take advantage of tax benefits for your own private health insurance plan is for any medical expenses in excess of the government-stipulated percentage of your annual income, which is somewhere in the ballpark of 7 percent.) This also means that the private medical insurance quotes that you obtain will typically be significantly more expensive, as a result.
2. Some private insurance plans impose waiting periods on preexisting medical conditions. The new health care law that was passed during Barack Obama’s presidency prohibits denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions, but it does not prevent insurance companies from imposing these waiting periods. So this is another thing to consider when seeking to obtain private health insurance quotes.
3. The advantages of obtaining private insurance quotes are many: You get to pick and choose whichever health insurance plan best suits your particular needs. You aren’t restricted to only choosing from a limited selection of plans, like you might have to if you were seeking to obtain health insurance through your employer. You are free to cancel your insurance plan any time and make changes to the plan at any time, by adding or removing dependents, or by changing coverage amounts. This is in direct contrast to the restriction on employer-based health insurance plans that only allow you to make changes if a “life changing event” occurs, or only during an annual enrollment period.4. It is important to weigh your options in the context of out-of-pocket expenses. Insurance providers will have you believe that it is only the money that you pay directly to a medical provider that is classified as an “out-of-pocket” expense, and that the money that you pay directly to the health insurance company is not. But what you need to do is think like a smart consumer: Regardless of whether you are paying money to the medical insurance company, or you are paying money directly to the doctor, it is all “out-of-pocket” money, because the money is flowing out of the same “pocket”! You can either choose to pay a higher premium and lower deductible. Or you can pay a lower premium and higher deductible. In the end, it really boils down to how much total money are you willing to spend on medical expenses per year.