health-insuranceA health insurance comparison will help you know what the best policy is for you to buy. Health insurance is a hot topic on everyone’s minds nowadays. If you don’t have it, you want it, because medical expenses are so high. If you DO have it, you want to be sure you’re getting the best deal. Employers are raising insurance premiums for employees each day, making health coverage out of reach for many people who are employed full-time. If you have to self-insure, it gets even MORE expensive. So how can you be sure you’re getting the most bang for your insurance buck?  

The following health insurance comparison should help you make an informed decision in covering your family’s medical expense needs. Here are the top 5 types of health insurance, and what each one can do for you:

HMOs-HMO stands for Health Maintenance Organization. HMOs are one of the most common employer-provided insurance policies. In an HMO, all of your medical care is coordinated by your primary care physician. If you need to see a specialist, your primary physician must write you a referral, or the HMO won’t pay for it. This greatly restricts your freedom in getting appropriate medical care, since each new specialist you see requires a trip to the primary care doctor first. However, the lack of flexibility is made up for in the ultra-low premiums this type of policy generally offers.

 PPOs-PPO stands for Preferred Provider Organization. This is the second most popular type of insurance policy. In a PPO, you don’t need a referral from a primary care physician to see a specialist. In fact, you’re free to see any doctor you want at any time. However, PPOs maintain a network of their “preferred physicians,” and you pay a significantly smaller co-pay if you use a physician that’s in the network. You’ll still receive benefits for out of network doctors, but your co-pay for these visits will be higher than if you’d stayed in the network.

 POSs-This is also known as a point of service plan. In the POS plan, you visit a primary care physician that has previously agreed to give you a discounted fee through the insurance. You can get significantly reduced office visit prices this way, and this makes the POS policy a good money saver. However, it also has limited flexibility, in that you must get your primary care physician to give you referrals to other in-network specialists in order to obtain insurance benefits for those visits.

 In part two of this article, we’ll continue our health insurance comparison by comparing Medicare and Medicaid. These two government-sponsored health insurance programs are attracting an increasing number of users each year. You want to be sure you know the qualifications for these policies, as well as the benefits they offer, so stay tuned!

This is the first installment in our health insurance series. Be sure to check back for updates…

Filed under: Health Insurance

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