Which plans are you choosing and why?
16 replies (most recent on top)
The medical without Out Of Network coverage is something to avoid!!! How awful!!
Cigarette smoker here, there is no way I should have to pay more for my healthcare insurance. Since smokers usually die early, the cost for a smoker vs. Non-smoker is a wash!
You may die earlier & then again maybe not. I've know smokers/drinkers who made it to 100+.
As a non-smoker, I don't want to pay more in premiums as you wind up coughing, gagging, rotting in the hospital & on respiratory therapy for 10 years before you do croak with me paying a percentage going towards your care which will not be there for me the next 10 years.
If I were the governor, I would buy you some get off smoking gum and give you 6 months to stop smoking AND then turn you loose, i.e. NOT INSURED with us non-smokers.
Cigarette smoker here, there is no way I should have to pay more for my healthcare insurance. Since smokers usually die early, the cost for a smoker vs. Non-smoker is a wash!
Muddling through it now and doing the compares. Has anyone attended one the the Q&A sessions?
IMO, Dental Basic is only good if you are reasonably confident you will have no problems. For years I had Dental Bronze, which was great when I was younger and only needed cleanings. Zero cost premiums; annual checkups. But then I got hit with two root canals in a single year and blew right past the maximum coverage. I actually deferred some work until I could bump my plan to Gold. So it's a gamble... $300 in premiums vs "Will I Need Any Repair Work Next Year?!?" Getting older, so I'll go with higher coverage...just in case.
To keep the same plan for me (currently Bronze) I have to go with High D Broad select, jump from $75 per month (individual) to $150 per month. Unless I want to have no non network coverage by taking the High D Select and it stays at $75.
I used the tool to check for in-network hospitals around the country and allot of area's have zero in-network facilities. Guess I have to stop traveling or pay the $150 per month for the H.D. Broad. :(
Are they still charging smokers the additional $75 per month? I don't see it in any options. High Deductible broad for my area says $150 per month, not sure if that includes the non smoker discount.
Most intelligent people do not opt for dental insurance. Sure you get $300 per year subsidy from T, it still does not payoff. Just pay as you go, it's cheaper in the long run.
It's very hard getting good accurate info. For medical the broad plan looks best by covering out of network and more doctors. Dental the basis with $500 is ridiculously low but the higher coverage doesn'took justified for the cost. Vision I haven't figured out. When they send you 150 page summary that tells you little I have to suspect t they are hiding things but easy to see our benefits are worse and very very poor
AON, now ALIGHT is terrible. Their website does not work most of the time. It crashes often. Their phone lines are always busy. They don't keep appointments and 3 years ago they changed my appointment 4 times, cancelled, changed then called me to tell me that my new appointment was on a Saturday at 7:00am and I told them that I would be out of the U.S. for 2 weeks. Then the AON employee tried to get me to say cancel my appointment, which I did not. They don't have answers, tell lies, don't know the products they sell. Just awful experience. They send letters saying if you like your plan you do nothing but when you go into their site and press the Finished Button I got a message telling me my insurance is no longer available, watched as the price changed from $62 to $69.49 - Nothing has changed. At&t has crummy benefits and awful vendors.
It is the 2nd day of enrollment, just doing due diligence to look up existing providers to make sure that they are still in network. "Provider Search Tool is currently unavailable. Please wait a few minutes and try again."
What kind of f@#$ing mo--ns are running this s%^& show?
Search still doesn't work, so much for employees are the most important assert.
What they have done is take last year's bronze plan and make it the highest level of coverage available aka "broad". They shrunk the network for the other 2 plans and did away with all out of network unless it is an "emergency". Your definition of an emergency might be different than the Monday morning quarterbacking insurance company. None of the specialist my family sees are covered by anything but the broad plan. So my only realistic choice is the broad plan.
For medical single the maximum out of pocket is $7,500 that is not millions. Just go In-Network. Not a problem. It was $7,000 this year.
Choose wisely, after 2028 you will no longer have T subsidized healthcare benefits.
My wife’s plan!
The dental plans are terrible - well, dental plans are always terrible. But the cap for the new "bronze" plan is $500 a year. It was $1000 last year. To increase the cap to $2500, you have to pay basically $300 in premiums, which is a terrible ratio. The odds of that ever paying off are slim. I might get the lowest one and then use my dentist's own discount system.
Medical, there's no way I'm exposing myself to literally unlimited medical costs for out of network care. That should be illegal. The whole point of insurance, even high deductible, catastrophic insurance, should be to protect you from economic catastrophe. Even the lowest of the low plans did that in previous years. Now, if you seek out of network treatment for what they deem to be not an emergency, you can literally owe millions of dollars and insurance won't kick in a penny if you're on the lowest plan. That's not insurance, in my opinion. So the broad option is the only one that is reasonably considered insurance.
Vision "insurance" is just a way for Luxottica to get you to use their high-priced doctors. It was never really insurance anyway. I'll just choose the low one.
https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-eyewear-vision-plans-20190319-story.html