3 Ways to Drop Your Health Insurance Rate
Private medical insurance prices are influenced by several factors. You may be able to lower your cost for health care by eliminating unneeded coverage, by increasing your fitness level or by shopping around for coverage.
Medical insurance is expensive today because the cost of a hospital stay and the cost of a doctor’s visit are expensive. The cost of health care rises each year as healthcare providers ask for more, more expensive procedures become available and hospitals charge more for their rooms. By reducing your insurance company’s costs you may be able to reduce your cost as well.
You may be able to reduce coverage for certain benefits that you don’t need or that are more expensive than they are worth. Maternity insurance, prescription coverage and dental insurance may be either unnecessary or over priced. People often pay extra for a policy that includes maternity insurance long after they have had their last child. Prescription coverage and dental coverage will often have relatively low annual limits. If so, the amount you would have at risk if you eliminated one of these benefits is the amount of the coverage limit less the cost of the coverage. This may mean that dropping the added cost is a good idea. Spend some time looking at the limits and the costs of these benefits and do the math to make sure that they are worth keeping.
Raising your deductible may also reduce your costs. By taking more or the risk, you can often reduce your costs by a lot. In some cases the amount of extra risk you take may be less than the amount of money that you save. Make sure than when you compare your premium savings to an increase in your deductible you multiply the premium savings by the appropriate factor to get the annual savings. Your deductible is probably based on a calendar year. You should compare it with the annualized savings to make an apples to apples comparison.
If you have been charged extra because of a medical condition or because of your weight, you may be able to reduce or eliminate the surcharge. You should find out what needs to happen in order to get your rate reduced if this is the case.
Often an insurance company will reduce or eliminate the surcharge if you have had a period of time where you haven’t needed treatment. If your preexisting medical condition has gotten better, you may be able to get your rate reduced. You may need to lose a small amount of weight or reduce your blood pressure readings by a small amount. Knowing what requisite numbers may motivate you to do the things you need such as exercise or eat better. You may be able to save more than just money by doing what it takes to get your health insurance premiums down.
Shopping around is a tried and true practice for saving money on health insurance, cars and many other things. There is often a large variance in medical insurance prices. You may find that you can save hundreds of dollars a month by switching to another company or even to a different type of policy that is offered by the same health insurance carrier.
There may be several factors that you have control over that will impact your cost for health insurance and health care in general. Reducing your coverage in unimportant or unneeded areas, reducing surcharges for pre-existing conditions and shopping around can all help you bring your costs for health insurance down.