One thing you learn if you work around insurance for a while is that instability and unpredictability drive everybody’s costs up. A lot. And it turns out it doesn’t matter if that’s car insurance, homeowners insurance, life insurance or health insurance.
Note from Mike: I’m sifting through the information coming out about the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, Medicare and healthcare in a Trump presidency. I’ll be back soon to offer my take on it, but in the meantime, see this Q&A on what Blue Cross is doing right now.
In my last blog post, I gave details about how much rates for individual customers’ health insurance are going up next year and why. I promised do a future blog about not just how much premiums cost, but how much financial protection the federally-designed products for 2017 give the average customer. This may get a bit wonky, so please bear with me as you go through.
Most of us have already been there. Someone very dear to you, a child, parent, brother, sister or spouse gets sick, and then really sick, and you get scared. What to do?
Health insurance companies like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana have a long history of trying to slow down the rapidly rising cost of healthcare. Over the years, a variety of strategies have emerged. Frankly, we’ve tried lots of stuff. When a company comes to us because their employee healthcare costs are going up too quickly, we try things like cutting out high-cost medical providers, steering people to less-expensive (but equally effective) drugs, raising out-of-pocket costs to discourage non-essential healthcare, and changing the mix between the employer contribution and the employee contribution.
The Difference Among PPO, HMO and High-Value Networks
Blue Cross has an active social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. We got this Facebook message from a member, and this is my response.
