Cheap health insurance for the family

No matter where you live in the US, every family is finding it difficult to balance the budget. It always comes down to the hard decisions. Given families need a home, food on the table and at least one vehicle to get around in, they all sit down at the end of the month and see how much is left for all the other bills. The only problem with this approach is that children often fail to cooperate. It seems they are always coming home from school with the latest illness, and then there are all those accidents as they slip and fall. All parents live with the certain knowledge they are one illness or accident from bankruptcy without health insurance. Even if the patient does qualify for ER treatment, the family will then be struggling with debt if it is one of the adults or claiming from the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) if they earn too much for Medicaid. As with all calculations, it requires some knowledge of what is available under the entitlement programs and then matching that to what can be afforded as coverage for the other situations.

In all this, remember there is no single policy that will give you and the family perfect cover. Even under the top-of-the-range plans where the premium rates are high, there will still be some money to find for treatment. The nearest you will come to the ideal, i.e. cheap health insurance for all the family, is under a group plan offered by a large employer. If you are fortunate enough to have such an employer, you can relax. Even if you lose the job, it is still cheaper to maintain the policy under COBRA than it is to match the cover under a plan provided by a private insurer.

If you are not lucky enough to have a health plan from your employer, there are two areas to work on to produce cheap health insurance. The first is the deductible. Be careful! There are often different deductibles depending on the nature of the claim, e.g. a different amount for a consultation as opposed to surgery. Second, look at the coverage. Decide what basic conditions you want to include and how you want to approach paying for prescription medications. Although you may not get complete peace of mind, affordable coverage is better than stretching to budget unrealistically in an attempt to cover more.

Cheap health insurance — group or individual plans?

When looking for cheap health insurance, what do you do if offered a choice between a group and an individual plan? Which is the cheap health insurance option?

As the names suggest, an individual plan is a policy you buy from a private health insurance company, whereas a group plan is one you access because you belong to a group of people. The most common form of group plan is offered by employers. As the US fell into a recession, business at all levels found the going tough. Now, even though there is a tax credit to encourage small businesses to continue and, in some cases, expand health coverage, most employers have been asking their employees to pay more. Even so, these employment-based plans tend to be cheap health insurance as the risks are spread out among quite large groups of people.