What is health insurance?
There is always a time when people are brand new to health insurance. Maybe you have always had coverage through your parents, or someone else always helped make the decisions for you. Some people get coverage through an employer who offers few choices. I remember working with a financial institution when I was younger and was given the “benefit” of health insurance. I had no clue what I was choosing, and thankfully was healthy enough to not care.
Health insurance is financial safety-net to help provide protection in the event of excessive costs associated with hospital or doctor bills. If you are in the hospital with a sixty-thousand-dollar bill, health insurance will provide a safety-net, capping your responsibility.
If I knew you were only going to use the doctor once or twice this year for minor issues (sinus infection, flu shot, etc.) I may suggest you not even get health insurance. But, if you ask the person laying in the hospital if they thought they would be in there the prior day, they would probably say “No.” We never know when something major will happen. But health insurance is not about “if” something happens, its “when” something happens!
We must protect ourselves.
The many ways to get health insurance are: employer coverage(group), ACA (affordable care act) and Marketplace, short term health insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. Most plans will require a premium to be paid monthly. A premium is a dollar amount, or how much the insurance costs. All plans will have a dollar amount safety-net, called an out-of-pocket maximum. This tells you the most you would pay in the event of a worst-case scenario.
There are lots of details about different coverage options. The first step is to understand the importance of having health insurance, and then getting a grasp on the basics – premium and out-of-pocket maximum.
We must protect ourselves.
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