From my research so far, it appears that if you have a group health care coverage, it tends to be cheaper than if you have to buy the insurance yourself. For example, a family of 4 may pay as much as $700 a month or more for some decent coverage, but perhaps group coverage from your employer may cost you $400 or so. But if your employer does not offer it, are there any associations that offer health insurance to their members? Associations that anyone can join?
Tags: Access Health, Group Health Insurance, Insurance Associations
Most major providers of insurance use a relationship with organizations such as the “American Business Association” in order to create a group. This is the rule and not the exception, as major insurers use these associations to gain acceptance for their plans more easily in the individual states. In regard to group vs. individual costs of coverage, the pricing is just all over the map. With smaller group plans (>20) the pricing is up to twice as much as individual medical plans. But with the large companies their plans can offer excellent benefits for relatively small costs.
I am in Texas and own a health and life insurance agency. There are no organizations here that I am aware of, but I have heard that the AARP offered plan (through United Healthcare) is a pretty good one.
I hope this is helpful.
Not any more. See, the reason group coverage seems ‘cheaper’, is there are a whole bunch of people on it – regardless of their health. So people with health issues that would double or triple their insurance are sharing the cost with people that wouldn’t buy health insurance at all.
There used to be associations that did it. What happened was, all those self-employed guys who couldn’t get health insurance on their own for $300 a month (because it was $600 a month) joined, and wanted the $300 a month rate. Well, because there was a higher than average unhealthiness, it cost more. So rather than paying $400 a month for the group coverage, the healthy guys left, paying $300 a month for their private policies. When that happened, the average health went down more, and the rate went up, sending more of the most healthy out for private policies.
You can see, it’s just a spiral where as rates went up, average health went down, making rates go up more, making average health go down more.
In other words, It didn’t work. It didn’t keep group rates down, and it didn’t make money for insurance companies. So they stopped doing it.
i live in indiana; the AARP plan is only a supplemental plan or they offer a hospital plan that from i read is basically a supplemental plan also;
my husband has parkinsons disease and uninsurable in the state of indiana; i am healthy and filled out a individual application and was surprised that they needed a 10 year history of every illness or exam i ever had; i was suprised since auto and home is only 3 years, but calculated that if someone had cancer and was over the 5 year survival rate, they would be uninsurable since they had had cancer;
i found out the hard way that if you have a pre-exisiting condition, they cannot insure you on an individual policy in the state of indiana; you are then able to go to the assigned risk pool which has a get this ;;;;$100K lifetime maximum; also, 5 years ago, when i was laid off from my 1st job and when the cobra ran out, they offered us a conversion policy with the same company for $2K per month for my husband only; it had a $100K max on the conversion policy; (cobra had 1 MM)
we figured in 4 years, the insurance company would be in the black for paying $96K in premium;
my husband is a self employed attorney and i am a laid off claim adjuster; so far we have managed on cobra and now am going to try a gap policy; this is a 2K deductible; but all we want is take care of any catastrophes; it does not cover RX and my husbands RX run over $200 a month; parkinsons is mainly drugs only;
since i am 8 years younger, i hope i dont get sick; our concern is that if something major happens, we could lose everything we worked for over 30 plus years;
that is why i am wanting some kind of universal health care; since over 47 million are uninsured and many are employed and cannot afford putting us in this mess; insurance is supposed to be the law of large numbers; if we insured everyone, you would have both the healthy and sick paying, which would keep the premiums down to pay claims;