I have seen a number of posts from people who are shopping for health insurance and are finding plans with premiums in the 1K+ range. As a business owner who has shifted our plans many times to save money I have found that our typical family plan is about 750/month with around a $500 deductible and 80-90% coinsurance. Therefore I was surprised to see a number of people giving quotes in the $1500 range.
If you having a preexisting condition, getting any insurance will be an issue, however for those of you who are generally healthy I wanted to provide an idea of how much health insurance could cost and how to use a high deductible model.
I currently use a PEO called administaff to provide health benefits to my employees. A PEO is a professional employer organization which essentially means that as a business owner, when I sign up, my employees work for both the PEO and for myself. The primary benefit of using them is that they form a very large pool of employees which saves a lot of money when signing up for health insurance. They require a minimum of 10 employees. I had previously recommended to a DKOS member who was self employed in the music teaching business, that she get 9 other people to form a company. That company could then sign up with administaff to get the inexpensive and full coverage health insurance. Clients would pay the company and the company would just pay the money as appropriate to the members. However the big benefit would be taking advantage of the PEO's pool as well as the tax deductibility of insurance premiums by businesses. In case you don't know, businesses pay about 35% (or whatever your highest tax bracket is) less for health insurance than you do just by virtue of it being tax deductible.
In the case of DKOS members, DKOS, for example, could form a company which receives revenue from whoever (tippers?) or even from the "employees" themselves and then sign up with a PEO and pay for the health insurance at corporate pool rates, pre-tax.
In any case that is not the crux of this article, what I really want to do is describe how a high deductible plan could be the answer to your immediate health insurance needs. A friend of mine was raving about his HDHP and how the premium was around $300/month for a family. I was surprised because I had looked at them when they first came out and after running a few scenarios they weren't even close to being competitive. However it has been a few years and I guess the insurance companies have found out how to properly price them. They must really reduce medical costs, because the premium costs are substantially less than normal low deductible plans. In my view the best way to reduce overal medical costs is to have the people consuming the service be the ones that pay. That way every transaction gets scrutinized for the best value.
I started digging around to see if I could find at least some ballpark numbers for cost and I found this Blue Cross Blue Shield site which goes into detail about their "standard" prices. Obviously the real prices vary depending on your particular circumstances, but I think these are reasonable for at least showing the order of magnitude.
http://www.health--savings--accounts...
The Blue Edge HSA plan is here:
http://www.health--savings--accounts...
I looked at the rates for the Blue Edge HSA plan since it seemed to best match the coinsurance and deductible limits on the main page.
The PPO saver plan with a 10K deductible is the cheapest plan, but Im not sure how the PPO saver is different than the PPO Select Choice.
The reason why I like the High Deductible Health Plans is because they work like insurance is supposed to. They protect against catastrophic surprise events.
We currently pay around $750 for a family, which means I pay about $9000/year per employee with a family. I pay around $250/month for individuals or $3000/year.
My typical employee is between 30-40 years old and has a spouse and 2 children. Let's use the 35-40 age bracket. For my typical employee with a spouse and two children, I would pay $329/month or around $4K/year. For a single I would pay around $900-$1100/year.
I'm saving about $5K for each married employee. If I use that money to fund a high deductible savings account for the employee, the employee sees an additional tax free $5K/year which equates to over $7K pre tax. In addition, within just a year or two they can consider the HSA fully funded for any emergency and that $5K will just accumulate tax free for them.
The big benefit to me is that employees don't assign a dollar value to health insurance because it is all kind of the same, but when I can give them more cash that has incredible benefit for retention.
For those of you on DKOS who are struggling to get health insurance I encourage you to look at the HDHP because at the very least they limit your total exposure and can prevent a medical bankruptcy from a catastrophic medical event. Look to the 100% coinsurance plan so you don't have any payments once you pass the deductible.
I do recognize that there are issues. If you get a chronic disease that requires $10's of thousands in medication and treatment each year over an extended period of time this won't help you. You might be better off forming a "company" that will let you join a PEO and pool your insurance with lots of healthy people. If you have a preexisting condition and aren't covered under COBRA or another insurance plan you might have serious problems getting any health insurance. But otherweise I think that this is a reasonable direction to look.
Good luck and I hope that this will help a few people to at least work within the system we have now, rather than having to wait for the government to fix our problems.