Male: If someone has never bought health insurance before, do you have any tips that might help them?
Bob: Most of us have grown up in families where the health insurance is provided, certainly, by our parents. And it is provided by our parent’s employer or, you know, government agency that they work for or whatever. And so, most of us have grown up in families where health insurance hasn’t talked about very much, you know, somebody got sick, they got taken off to the doctor and there really wasn’t whole lot of discussion about what kind of coverage you had or how much it cost or anything else. And that’s part of the problem, frankly, that we’re in today and why health insurance and health care is so expensive in some cases is the consumer, you and I, haven’t been engage in the process of, you know, actually buying our own health care. So some tips for, some tips for buying health insurance for a person that’s never done it before, number one, you need to go out learn about it. The internet is a good place to do that, you can go to our website and there’s a lot of, you know, frequently asked questions where you can see the answers. There are hyperlinks on most of the words on our sites, so that if you ran across a word that you don’t understand, you can click on it and get a definition of that word. So a good thing to do is go the internet, type in health insurance on one of the search engines and often times you’ll be brought to our website anyway, and you can start the learning process, of learning about health insurance. And you’re gonna need to learn about deductibles and how they work. And by the way deductibles in health insurance work very much like your deductibles in your car insurance, so you actually already know little bit about deductibles from your car insurance coverage, so it’s very much the same in health insurance. But you’ll also gonna learn about HMO’s, or Health Maintenance Organization, and you’re gonna learn about PPO’s and how those work. Believe me, once you get into this system and you start utilizing your care and utilizing your product, your health insurance plan, you’re gonna get very good at this. We can all learn once we get into it on how they work. I think it’s important though as you’re buying that you wanna try to stick one of brand names especially if you never buy health insurance before, and you really don’t know much about how to go about it, then you wanna zero in on the brand name health insurance companies. That simply so that you don’t get into something that is now a true health insurance product. There are some products out there that are discount cards and other products out there that limit your benefits and so on. Those products all have a place on the market, but if you’re new at this, I would stick with your known brands like United Health and Aetna and Blue Cross, Kaizer, the name brands that you recognize in your specific area are going to be insurance companies that are gonna be there when you need them, okay. So, I would stick with some of the brand names that this is new to you. And then finally, if you have any question and you’re shopping in the internet, you found in your internet that site that has a lot of the brand names, but you still have some questions, pick up the phone, you know, dial the number associated with that website. We have an 800 number that you can use, you can talk to a licensed health insurance representative, and I think that’s very important. Because, these people are, you know, licensed by the state that they work in. They’ll gonna be able to answer any questions that you have related to the health plan that you’re considering, how it works, you know, what the benefits are, how the pricing works, any of those terms that you’re still not clear on, they can answer those questions. Get all of those questions answered before you actually buy for the first time your health insurance plan. Once you’ve done all that homework, I really sincerely that you can rest assure that you bought something that’s gonna be there for you in the future. It’s gonna cover you if something bad happens and it’s gonna give you access to routine preventative care that you might need. So you’re gonna be set up financially for managing your own health care.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services