Aetna Individual Health
Insurance Buyer's Guide in Florida
Aetna Individual Health Insurance Florida Individual
and Family Medical Plan Breakdown
If you are looking at
Aetna Health Insurance plans
for the first time please look at the side chart or view the
Florida health insurance
quote page. Remember even with all the individual choices
that Aetna has in Florida with their
health insurance there is a plan
that will fit your needs. If you find yourself getting confused
please call us or visit our online health brochures.
Most Floridians are familiar with their health
insurance perhaps from a company that once provided it or if they
owned a company and purchased it for their employees. However, when it
comes to understanding
individual medical insurance in Florida you
must abandon all your original thoughts and knowledge and be content
to know that this is (unnecessarily in our opinion) challenging.
Individual insurance in Florida is its own animal and can be very
confusing if you don't keep it simple.
Therefore when shopping for
individual health insurance the first thing to remember is that you
most likely want what everyone wants when it comes to individual
health insurance in Florida and that is the most for the least. On the
left is a list of all of our individual carriers and a link to a quote
from each of them. Above that is our "start my quote" button which gives you a quick comparison quote
from most of them in one place. Unfortunately, at press time we
couldn't get them all in the same place yet, but we are working on it.
You want office visits with a
straight-forward co-pay and no surprises to come in the mail in the
form of bills for labs and prescriptions. You might be willing to make
some sacrifices but you do want at least co-pays for these basics.
In our experience this is 90% of the
market. The other 10% will be happy with catastrophic medical
insurance. What most of you are talking about is a co-pay plan from a
PPO such as the United Health Care/ Golden Rule Co-pay Select plans,
the Aetna POS plans, the Cigna POS plans, the Blue Cross PPO plans
(most of them they have tons of them), and a few others depending on
where you live.
But what separates most of our
customers the happy ones from the ones that pay their bills with a
frown every month are the ones who have the plans from Blues in the
90's are the Vista Health plan and or Coventry PPO plans. What
separates these plans? It is in fact that they have co-pays for
everything else besides just office visits and prescriptions. This
plan specifically the Vista plan in my case has saved me hundreds of
dollars per year in medical costs and the Blue Cross PPO plans (90
series) would have done the same thing as would the Coventry plans.
I am not preaching Florida HMO's
here, but I will tell you that if you are willing to put up with
certain things you will save money over the course of a year if you
tend to go to the emergency room or have diagnostic testing etc. Of
course Blue Cross plans and Coventry would also accomplish this, and
depending on where you live and how big your family is one of these
plans would most likely be the solution to the least premium for the
most health insurance in Florida.
On the other hand the new Cigna
individual plans are the price leaders in Florida for the most part
right now but don't' have the benefits of the plans mentioned above.
Therefore, we must in future articles
break down the health insurance companies by region and demographic
and tell you who is the cheapest based on certain factors in various
hypothetical situations. Unfortunately, these are not the only factors
in buying health insurance if you are an individual or family in
Florida.
Pre-Existing Conditions and Florida Health Insurance
Individual medical insurance in Florida is different
from group medical insurance in Florida because of the fact that the
underwriting departments at each Florida insurance company will
scrutinize very closely any pre-existing conditions that an applicant
has in their health history (going back up to 10 years) if they are
applying for an individual policy.
Individual carriers get to go through
your health records, your prescription history, and even (though they
tend not to do it anymore) send a nurse to your house to do a paramed.
And once they collect this information they will use it to either
charge you a higher premium or decline you entirely.
Some of them will also make your
condition be excluded for a year if it is on their listed of
pre-existing health conditions. These can include high blood pressure
or high cholesterol, or can be the even more severe diabetes which at
this time is nearly impossible to cover with an individual policy,
although Aetna and a smaller, newer company Avalon are looking at each
on a case by case basis. Sometimes an insurer will charge you the
higher rated up premium and also rider it out. This means that you
could be paying for coverage for an excluded condition. We find this
unfair at East Coast Health Insurance and will usually reapply you
until we can get a cleaner policy issue. What about if you get declined altogether and you find yourself getting older?
Florida Group Health
Insurance Basics
If we are to fully grasp the individual health
insurance policy in Florida then we must briefly cover group health
insurance.
Florida group medical insurance is
easier to comprehend because it doesn't matter what your health
conditions are as the group is looked at as a whole instead of by
individual or family. This is great if you have conditions that
require chronic attention as an individual carrier would most likely
not take you.
But if you are young and healthy and
your group is the opposite then you end up subsidizing the group by
paying higher premiums then if you would have taken out an individual
plan. Also an individual plan is portable so you could take the plan
to your next job should you have to leave. The next big reform in
healthcare should be to give some portability to these plans so that
the insurance companies would have some interest in covering more
people. On the other hand group coverage is usually better because you
pay at most 50% of the premium and will thus usually have more
benefits then the same individual plan for the same money. Also
maternity issues are almost 100% of the time better covered in a
group.
Maternity is a complex thing and in
many cases I recommend not taking individual policies for this as they
are never comprehensive. individual medical insurance) - that is
unless your employer is paying the cost for all of your group medical
insurance: then you are quite happy (unless you have a family and your
employer is not so kind as to pay for them to be on the group medical
coverage as well!
Finding The Lowest, Cheap
Florida Health Insurance Rates
Clicking our get a quote button will
help you compare the same plan from multiple carriers and be careful
to make sure you keep in mind coinsurance maximums and out of pockets
(see our glossary)when
comparing health insurance plans as what looks like a good deal with
one company can often be beaten by a seemingly more expensive
competitor. To further complicate this situation, there is no concrete
example of this as based on your zip code, age, and family size it can
change from one county in Florida to the next.
However there is a new plan in Miami
from the state and a certain company that we cannot mention in print
due to our contract with them but if you've read this far please call
us about it.
Things to Be Careful of when
Shopping
Never buy a discount plan unless its
AAA and includes three car tows a year. These are not necessary and
will sometimes hurt you more then help you as they might impede us
from getting you a social program through the county, state, or
federal government. If you are about to buy a discount plan, unless it
is to be paired with an actual health insurance policy with a high
deductible (AND EVEN AT THAT POINT YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED) you should
pick the phone and call us at 888-803-5917.
The other policies to watch out for
specifically would be anything from Health Markets such as Mega,
Midwest, and United American. If you have bought one of these policies
or any policy not from a carrier that I am about to mention, you
should walk or run over to your files and pull out the policy right
now. Aetna, Avmed,
United/Neighborhood/Golden Rule, Humana, Cigna,
Vista, Coventry,
Blue Cross. This is the list of all the carriers that
we currently deal with. If you have any other carriers, you should
look at your policy and look at the first page and make sure that your
deductible added to your coinsurance or co-pays which equals your
maximum out of pocket is at least defined. Many companies will sell
you a policy with no defined maximum out of pocket, I could name these
carriers but suffice it to say that you should always have a defined moop (maximum out of pocket). Secondly, you should have one annual
deductible, not one per incident. And lastly and also very important,
there should be no caps on anything except your lifetime maximum which
should be at least 1 million but is usually 3-5 million.
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