There are insurance companies that sell different health insurance plans, with wide variety in details and pricing. It is important for customers to know how they can reduce their overall costs:
1) Review the coverage and costs regularly:
It is not a good thing to brag how we have save $100 each year on home or car insurance, but not bothering to find ways to reduce health insurance costs. In this case, we should make sure that we also perform similar kinds of research on health insurance plans. Insurance brokers should be able to help us review our coverage for an affordable fee.
As an example, we may change our health insurance plan to a different company and we could save more than $250 each year. By performing regular reviews, we should be able to improve the overall coverage, while lowering the deductible.
2) Remove unnecessary options:
We should take a closer look at our coverage to find options that we don’t really need. As an example, healthy and young individuals may rarely need to see their doctors. It means that they don’t need a plan that provides coverage on the unlimited annual doctor visits. In this case, the plan could provide coverage for 5 visits a year. This could dramatically drop our premium dramatically.
The same thing also applies to prescription medications. A generally healthy individual could obtain generic brand on local drugstore for less than $5. This is a much more affordable option than having to pay an extra $50 each month for medications coverage. Removing unnecessary elements in our health insurance policy should be quite easy and straightforward.
3) Choose high deductible plans and supplementary accident coverage:
One of the biggest causes of claims in the health insurance industry is accident. Many insurance companies provide supplementary accident coverage in the health insurance plan. As an example, we could have a $5000 health insurance plan on surgical and hospital visits; which is a basic policy that covers vision, dental, prescription drugs, some doctor visits and others.
In this case, we may need to include a $2500 supplemental accident plan with $100 deductible. It means that during an accident, we could be covered by up to $2500 each year and we will need to pay for the $100 deductible. In this case, we are able to save money by having high deductible plan.
4) Don’t smoke:
It’s quite obvious that tobacco has no health benefits when inhaled. As an example, a person with good health may need to pay $150 per month on health insurance plan. But if he is a smoker, the premium could jump to $250 per month. This is an extra $1,200 per year and along with so many cigarettes that we buy, this represent a huge amount of expense.
So, if we are smoking, we should try the best we can to give it up. If we are not motivated enough to stop for our own health, we could do that for our wallet. Health insurance companies provide preferred rating for people who haven’t smoked in the last six months. We could save up to 40 percent on our insurance costs by not smoking.