Individual Health Insurance

First, if you and your family are healthy and don’t use a lot of prescription medicine, you might want to think about buying an individual insurance plan instead of a group insurance plan. The premiums for individual insurance plans are anywhere from 20% to 50% lower than group insurance. The premiums for individual are lower because:

• The rates are based on your age and tobacco use status
• Health insurers will ask medical questions, and based on your answers, you could receive full coverage, be refused, or have exclusion riders attached to your policy.
• Most individual plans will have some restrictions on maternity.
• All individual plans are medically underwritten, so if you or a family member have major medical problems, this may not be the direction to take.

Types of Individual Plans

Most individual plans have deductibles and coinsurance features. The best pricing starts with $1000 deductibles. Remember if you want the lowest cost insurance, the higher the deductible and out of pocket expense, the better. This is exactly opposite of what we all desire. All of us would like low-cost health insurance with low deductibles, and out of pocket expenses. However, to keep monthly premiums as low as possible, we need to buy high-deductible types of health insurance.

Preferred Provider Organization(PPO)

Most individual plans are PPO style. Under this arrangement, you receive discounts by using doctors and hospitals that are in the PPO network. Some PPO plans will have fixed co-payments of either $25 or $30 per office visit and co-payments for prescription benefits. PPO’s give you broad latitude in the choice of doctors and hospitals.

HMO Plans

Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) plans generally offer richer benefits, but have a more restricted provider network. Currently, Kaiser Permanente is the only individual HMO available in Colorado, and is ONLY available in the Denver metro area. For an individual health insurance quotes click here