Your Options in Unemployment Health Insurance

When it comes to your choices in unemployment health insurance, of course, COBRA should be on top of your list. With this system, you get to stay on your former employer's health insurance scheme, except that you have to pay your employer's share too. It can work up to something that's four times what you used to pay when you were on the job. What do you do though if your employer never offered you health insurance? Or if it's run its course and you don't have an option in COBRA anymore? What do you do for instance, if your company has just closed down and there is no COBRA for you?

The first thing you should do is to take care of the short term. Look at how you might be eligible for government programs like Medicare, Medicaid or S-CHIP.

You mustn't worry about buying a good few months worth of unemployment health insurance from one of these plans. If you buy for three months and you end up getting a new job in two, you can always ask for a refund. With these plans, they offer you short-term protection for a specific number of weeks. Not only are these plans cheap, they don't really look too hard at you to see whether they want to accept you.

In fact, that would be an excellent philosophy to hold when you're looking for unemployment health insurance. Since it's likely you'll get your job in the next few months, even if you do get an expensive health insurance plan, it's not going to be a bad thing to get the expensive stuff.

You don't have to reckon how much it'll cost you for the whole year and then the whole decade and so on. You are not going to be unemployed for a long time. You just have to think of how much it will cost you to get something like a high deductible plan for instance, if you just keep it for a couple months.

You know what a high-deductible plan is, don't you? It's where the insurance company charges you very low premium, but they make you pay something like $5000 a year as your contribution to your own medical care should something come up. If you're young and healthy, this is a plan you really should go for. You have health insurance, and you really don't have to worry about bleeding yourself every month paying a premium.

Sometimes, none of these options are open to you. Because you have a pre-existing condition. In that case, here's a good idea -try pcip.gov. It's the government's high-risk insurance pool. You don't even have to be declined by a regular insurer to be able to apply here. You can just go there.

If you get your health insurance through your lawyer, you mustn't think that you have every tough decision to do with your health insurance needs all taken care of. Having your employer pay your health insurance premium for you can be such a blessing. But it isn't everything you need. If you're even a little bit slow with these decisions he needs to move on, you may lose big time on a few areas of savings.

For instance, December, the last month of every year, is open season at most companies for those who wish to make changes to their employer-provided health insurance plans.

Now this might make you wonder - why do you even need to make a decision every year. You're just supposed to go with whatever plan you've always had, right? No. There are all kinds of opportunities wasted when you do this.

You can end up paying too large a health insurance premium this way. Let's take a look at how you can end up making these mistakes.

When it comes to what to pay for your health insurance, there are two parts that you have to keep score of - the health insurance premium itself that your employer deducts out of your paycheck, and the deductible that you have to pay each time you visit the doctor.

Most people hate the deductible, of course. When they are insured, they feel, they should just be insured. They shouldn't have to ever worry about whether they have enough money for the deductible that a sudden health crisis brings up.

But that isn't a good idea. You see, you don't have to agree to a large co-pay for a big drop in the size of your health insurance premium.

Not to mention, you could even opt for a big co-pay, and it would make no difference to you almost all the time. If you are young and healthy, there's little chance that anything will happen. And you don't even have to live in fear that something unexpected will happen. Whenever you save on the extra-large health insurance premium that a deductible for you plan requires, you can put into a saving account that you start just for this purpose.

Before long, you'll have plenty of money socked away to take care of any eventuality. What is better, it's actually your money to hold on to. Why give it to an insurance company?

Most people think that all they need to do is to just leave their insurance policy alone, and they will get the same kind of insurance coverage every year. You see that's the kind of thing that sensible people think. And as it happens, we do not live in a sensible world.

For instance, your employer might have switched to another health insurance provider to cut costs, and never bothered to tell you. Your plan may mean something entirely different with a different insurance provider.

And finally, here's the funny thing for most people forget to look at - spousal benefits. If your spouse has better benefits than you, why would eyou ven want to go with your company?

Health Insurance for Unemployed People

Remember how a couple of years ago, there was this bank robber who held a bank up and robbed them of one dollar? He was very ill, he was unemployed and he had no health insurance. He felt that if he could go to jail, he could somehow survive on government-provided healthcare. Well, while that's an extreme example o how difficult things can be in a country where there is no health insurance for unemployed people. The less extreme among us don't go through experiences that are necessarily a lot better.

There are 15 million unemployed people in this country who bat about trying their best to look for health insurance for unemployed people. This is what they need to know.

Knowledge is power. In the health insurance business, where vendors seem to delight in complicating matters to the point of incomprehensibility, finding the best plan for your needs can seem like a tall order. But you will find that when you take the time to do your homework and really understand all the information there is, your job with becomes somewhat easier. In fact, try doing your homework on a website like CoverageForAll. It's a nonprofit that really helps health insurance for unemployed people.

The first thing you want to do is to decide on the kind of coverage you want and the kind you actually need. Healthy, single people don't really need a low deductible all-inclusive health insurance plan. If you have kids and you're responsible for what happens to everyone though, a low deductible plan would be entirely appropriate, even if it costs a good bit more.

Once you have a list of all the different providers that you need to look at, you just need to write it all down for simple comparison shopping.

Of course, the kind of budget you have to work with has a lot to do with which insurance vendor you go with. You need to have a realistic idea of the kind of budget you can work with. But that doesn't mean that you should completely err on the side of financial prudence and say that you can't afford anything. It can turn out to be a catastrophic decision to have made one day.

For instance, you might think that you can't afford COBRA care, and you may completely skip it. If you've just lost your job, COBRA should be your number one choice. Yes, you have to pay both your employer's share and your own. It could cost you $1000 a month - four times want you paid at your job. But it is excellent coverage, and you can't find anything for your whole family at that price. Remember - medical expenses are the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country.