By Pin-Yu Liao
With the increasing amount in medical cost, Americans should look for plans best fit for themselves and prevent from looking for ones with lowest premiums. Choose the plan that’s most important to you.
You can begin with the group plans from your employers. Group plans are usually a lot cheaper than individual plans.
There are 3 main types of insurance plans you can select. The first one is health maintenance organization (HMO). The second one is preferred provider organization (PPO). The last option is high deductible health plan. Fee-for-service still exists, but the use of it has been decreasing.
Choices are limited if you choose HMO, because you can go to doctors that are associated with HMO’s network. The advantages are that you don’t have to pay deductible and co-payment, and it is a low-cost option.
For PPO you can go to the doctors without its network and only pay a small portion of co-payments. High deducible health plan allows deductible to be higher. The plan is connected with a health savings account. You can save pretax amount in the savings account and withdraw it when you need to pay for deductibles.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/your-money/health-insurance/primerhealth.html
http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/04/23/proconed0423.html
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