Health Insurance Headaches

A lot of the variance in health plan costs depends upon the carrier, the number of members in the plan, how well it's negotiated and the ratio of high-risk versus low-risk members, among other things that only the actuaries know how to figure out. It's insane!

have heard stories about families paying as much as $900 for insurance. But also had a friend who worked for the university system who is paying $1.50 a month. It's crazy how much costs can swing. why the unpredictability?

When our son was about to be dropped from our corporate health plan because of the max child dependant age, we found an individual plan that we could put both him and our daughter on. However, her portion of the coverage cost more than his. I think that's unfair.

What hurts my family the most is the skyrocketing contributions we have to pay out of my husband's paycheck every month! Even with insurance from work, nearly $500 is deducted from his paycheck every month for family insurance. That is crazy! We might as well not even have employer "paid" insurance at this rate! We could just go out and get our own!

Glad you asked! For the past few weeks, my darling groom and I have been riding the circular train route trying to figure out what, exactly, we're supposed to do to make sure my recent series of chiropractic treatments are covered properly. Because we have a high deductible to keep the premiums down, and an HSA (Health Savings Account) to draw funds from, it has been a more confusing process to file than we've had before.

Today, we finally got things figured out (we hope!) and downloaded a form that we're supposed to submit to the carrier so that they'll pay the provider directly. There had been a question whether we were to have received some sort of debit card for the HSA. One agent said there was, another said there wasn't and that we were to use our main PPO card.

This whole experience makes me wonder how well the member services folks are trained, if they have too many programs to deal with, if they're not getting any better information on the programs than the consumer - or what!

I'm just hoping we get through this with no surprises - like we had when our daughter had a surgical procedure and we kept getting surprised by the multitude of billings from separate entities! Good grief!