Health insurance can be quite confusing.
Unemployment doesn't just mean losing your salary, it means possibly losing your benefits. Although most companies allow you to continue your health care for 18 months under the COBRA benefit, COBRA is quite expensive. You just might have to go out and find your own health insurance coverage. The eHow is designed to give you ideas of find affordable health coverage.
Instructions
1. There are thousand of health insurance plans on the market. If unemployment hits, the first place to turn is to your employer. Find out if they will offer you health insurance under the COBRA plan. COBRA benefits are allowed for up to 18 months but can be prohibitively expensive. You very well might do better by checking out private health insurance plans.
2. There are many good internet sites which will give you a comparison of health insurance plans. My favorite, and the one I used to get my own insurance, is ehealthinsurance.com (link in resources). Once you're on their website, you will put specific information into a form (items such as age, height, weight, etc) and they will provide you with a LOT of choices.
3. The deductible factors in heavily when deciding which health plan in which to enroll. If you're only interested in catastrophic health coverage (like I was), you can get away for as little as $125 or so a month. My deductible is set high at $5000 but the payoff is that my premium monthly is quite low. Since I wasn't interested in covering every single doctor visit, this type of plan worked for me.
4. Decide on what level of health care you will accept. Are you interested in keeping your own doctors or will you accept an HMO insurance plan? I'm not a fan of HMOs so I insisted on being able to select my own doctors but there was a tradeoff here also - as I decided on the plan which most fit my needs, I had to check the plans documented allowed doctors. Luckily, most of my doctors were participants in the plan so I signed up with a local Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan.
5. Most of the internet health insurance websites have a 'compare plans' button where you might be able to compare up to 4 plans at once. Do NOT hesitate to call and verify your understanding of the plan before you sign up. Health insurance is ridiculously confusing, if you ask me!
Tags: health insurance, health insurance plans, insurance plans, compare plans, health care
