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Health Insurance for Individuals in KC: Get More Information Before You Buy Part 1

 

While most Americans with health insurance are covered under an employer’s plan, there are still many employers that don’t offer health insurance. Workers of companies not offering insurance are left to find and purchase their own private individual health insurance plans directly from an insurer.

There are actually several advantages to purchasing individual health insurance plans:

* Unlike those covered under an employer’s plan, you won’t just have a limited number of plans that were pre-selected by someone else to choose from. You, instead of your employer, get to determine what plan features are desirable and pick the plan that you see fit. By having a variety of plans available to you, such as those that don’t cover services you don’t want and that have higher deductibles, you can take advantage of lower premiums.

* Since private health plans are under your control, not your employer’s control, you also won’t have to worry about losing your coverage if you ever want to change jobs. As long as you pay your premiums when they’re due, the coverage is yours to keep and the insurer can’t drop you.

However, there are also several disadvantages to private health plan coverage, for example:

* Even if paying the same premium rates, individual plans usually provide less coverage than employer plans because individual policies have a larger percentage of the premium dollars going toward paying operational costs.

* The premiums for private health insurance plans increase as you age in most states. Since renewal rates tend to be higher than new policy rates, you can avoid the rate hikes for awhile by changing plans as rates become higher. However, this isn’t a long-term solution. Eventually, your age will make it more difficult to find an insurer and your individual policy will become more expensive.

* Group plans are typically required to insure all employees and their family members. On the other hand, if an applicant of an individual plan doesn’t have an ideal health status, then the insurer can reject the applicant.

This is part 1 of 2 about what to look for when purchasing health insurance for individuals in Kansas City or anywhere in the US. You can find the next episode here or sign up for our RSS feed.

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