Lost Your Health Insurance? Tips to Deal With It

The Columbus Dispatch has some tips for people who have been laid off and are currently uninsured. These suggestions can save you money on your health care:

• If your health insurance hasn't yet ran out, get any necessary tests done before it does.
• Ask your doctor to prescribe drugs with a generic equavilent, and request them from your pharmacist. Some stores sell some generics for just $4!
• Buy a prescription drug card that gives you discounts on medications.
• Get coverage through a high-deductible health insurance plan, which will protect you in a catastrophe with lower premiums than typical health insurance.
• Find out if the pharmaceutical company/ies that makes your medication(s) has a free drug program, such as PPaRX, for lower income individuals.
• Negotiate with your doctors for lower rates and/or an affordable payment plan for services. Many doctors are surprisingly open to that.
• See if your doctors can give you some free samples of prescription medication, given to them by the drug companies.

Remember to check out health insurance rates in order to become reinsured as soon as possible. Some plans could be more affordable than you think.

Individual Health Insurance in California

Individual health insurance rates for some California residents are going up 10 or 11 percent next year.

Jeff Aran has bought his own HMO policy from Kaiser Permanente since the mid-1980s. The last few years he's noticed his premiums are consistently 2 percent or 3 percent above the health insurance rates that the California Public Employees' Retirement System gets from the same Oakland-based health maintenance organization (Kaiser Permanente).

Aran and the 2.5 million Californians like him who buy individual health insurance may one day look back on 10% rate hikes as the good old days.

Individual & family policyholders have enjoyed slower premium increases from recent trends that have tamed medical costs a bit.

Baby boomers are generally healthier than previous generations and lower-cost generic drugs have flooded the market. The wave of health insurance company mergers that swept the industry a few years ago has abated. Negative press has also put some pressure on health insurers to hold down premiums.

Individual health plan policy owners will be hardest hit. Health care insurers don't make much money on individual plans, which cost more to administer, he said. As a result, the insurers are more likely to significantly raise those premiums when times get tight.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan rate calcualtion critized

a nationally renowned health insurance expert testified at a consumer hearing that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan used flawed, inappropriate methods to determine proposed rate hikes at issue in a consumer challenge.

James Geyer, former chief actuary for Aetna Inc., said BCBSM methods resulted in a substantial overstatement of its losses from its individual health insurance policies purchased by individuals without employer sponsored coverage, participation in these policies is growing as employers drop workplace health insurance benefits.

BCBSM earlier this year sought a 24% increases, on average, for these individual health insurance policies. Blue Cross was granted a 10% interim rate hike, which took effect June 1. The rate hikes affect roughly 19,000 people in 7 Blue Cross individual health plans. Blue Cross says the rate hikes are needed to offset losses in the individual health business, which totaled $52 million over 10 years.

If BCBSM had performed a more precise analysis of growth in the value plans the insurer would either break even or make $1.3 million, Geyer said, instead of incurring as much as $13 million in losses from the lines of business in question.