Medical Savings Account & High Deductible Health Insurance
Many people today can benefit from a growing trend towards what has come to be known as wellness insurance. Wellness insurance addresses the continuing movement towards focusing on keeping people well, instead of treating illness.
Group health insurance generally provides benefits that many people do not need. But even worse than just wasting money, most group health insurance policies do not offer adequate reimbursement for some efficacious medical treatments, particularly treatments focused on preventing disease rather than just alleviating the symptoms of disease.
Here’s why traditional health insurance isn’t for everyone:
- Families participating in group health care plans often pay for many benefits they don’t need
- Group plan participants have no guaranteed continuing coverage if they change jobs.
- Most employer-based group plans allow limited or no benefits for preventative or wellness expenses like regular chiropractic care.
- Most people are unaware of new individual tax-advantaged wellness banking options with benefits exceeding the best employer-sponsored plans.
- Most plans don’t have a provision or resources that cover non-prescription food supplements, and wellness products.
A typical Wellness Insurance Plan:
For many healthy individuals, the solution to this dilemma is a Wellness Benefit Plan combining a higher-deductible health insurance policy with a tax-advantaged bank account to pay for below-deductible items.
Such a Wellness Benefit Plan would save you money, and provide a better overall approach for you and your family for two reasons:
Higher-deductible health insurance policies (HDHPs) are less expensive, even if you become ill.
A typical family low-deductible health insurance policy may cost up to $5,000/year or more, whereas a similar family HDHP with a $2,500 annual deductible may cost as little as $2,000/year, a $3,000 annual savings. In this example, even if the insured gets very sick and has to spend the full $2,500 deductible, he or she would have saved $500/year after switching to a HDHP. The reason this is so is that the first $2,500 per year of a family’s medical care is typically spent in $100 increments in 25 transactions it may cost an insurance company $30 or more to process the paperwork for each transaction ($2,500 medical cost + $750 processing costs = $3,350).
Tax-advantaged Wellness Banking can halve the effective cost of patient contributions.
While health insurance premiums are now tax-deductible for self-employed people or are paid by their employer, the amounts that patients typically pay below their deductible (or for co-pays) are paid with hard-earned after tax dollars. If a patient has the proper wellness banking accounts such as a Medical Savings Account, they have funds readily available for under-deductible items (like optional services) and these items cost them almost half they amount because they are paid with tax-deductible money.
But most importantly, when the patient has control over the first dollars of their annual medical spending, the doctor and the patient are free to choose treatments in the best interest of the patient versus treatments in the best interests of the health insurance company.
Keep in mind that such a Wellness Benefit Plan with a higher-deductible health insurance policy isn’t for everyone because only people without expensive pre-existing conditions typically qualify for higher-deductible policies. That’s why a customized Wellness Benefit Program will allow each you to build your own customized Wellness Benefit Plan choosing from more than 500 health insurance policies and a multitude of tax-advantaged wellness banking accounts.