Thursday, September 11, 2008

How to Get Health Insurance For Less

How to get health insurance is a common question that arises in the mind of an individual who contemplates to buy health policies. The first thing, people need to do is, make a study about the different types of health plans and policies available. Hence, to start with, there are four basic types of health insurance policies available.

The first type of plan is indemnity plan. Indemnity plan allows people to select their own doctors. In this plan, insurance companies pay up all the cost of medical expenses, if individuals are hospitalized. Indemnity plan is the most flexible of all the health insurance plans. However, this plan is also the most expensive amongst all plans and involves a lot of paperwork.

HMOs, PPOs and POS Health Plans:

Second type of plan is HMO (Health Maintenance Organizations) plan. In this plan, individuals have to pay monthly insurance premium. It enables people to seek treatment from different hospitals located anywhere in the country. However, these hospitals or clinics need to be in list of hospitals that insurance companies provide.

In this plan, individuals can choose physician of their choice but that physician needs be working in one amongst the hospitals mentioned in the list. HMOs are restrictive sort of health plans but are affordable. In this plan, individuals have to pay low insurance premiums.

PPO (Preferred Provider Organizations) is another plan where, individuals have to pay monthly insurance premiums to avail treatment from the network of doctors and hospitals. In PPOs plan, people may choose their own doctors or choose physicians from the network. Nevertheless, if individuals are choosing their own doctors, they will have to pay extra premium each month.

Next type of plan is POS plan (Point of service). POS plans are the amalgamation of HMOs plans and PPOs plans. Here, individuals need to select their physicians from the list of doctors as provided by the insurance companies. However, people may select any other doctor which may not be present in the list, without having to pay extra premium.

How to Choose the Best Plan:

After the in-depth study of these health insurance plans, people need to obtain quotes from different health insurance companies. For that purpose, they may approach any of the local health insurance agents. These agents work either for different health insurance companies or for a single company.

However, people need to approach those agents, who work for different companies. The reason is, such agents will be in better position to provide quotes of several companies. Individuals may also log-on to health insurance web sites and select the questionnaire form. Fill in few personal details such as health information, job status, address, and contact numbers and so on. Submit the form and people will obtain quotes of different top rated insurance companies in a matter of seconds.

Compare different quotes and choose the one, which offers best rates. While selecting the plans, people need to see if the chosen plan covers features that they need. Check the co-pays, premium rates, deductibles and so on. Thus, people need to compare the features and select a plan that fulfills all their needs. Isn't the procedure of how to get health insurance plans simple enough?

You can get started right now by getting quotes using the following resources.

Ian Wright wants everyone to be able to get the health insurance coverage that they need. So to help he has created pages on how to get the cheapest health insurance quote and free health insurance quotes.