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Our Health Insurance Philosophy
Health Insurance in the 21st century is in some cases very good and in others very difficult. If you are a person who keeps a healthy life style and looking for discounts and lower premiums, good tax benefits and portability, there are many options to choose and savings to be had. If you are moderately healthy with just a few pre-existing ailments like HBP and Cholesterol treatment, your choices are also many, though you may pay a little more. If you have many pre-existing conditions or ones that are more serious, your choices are limited and expensive. With this being the health insurance environment, we at Ridinger Financial Services look to help our clients in any of these categories. Those clients in the latter category we cannot help personally, but we will direct them to the places where they can get coverage.
The hottest products on the market are the Health Savings Accounts. Essentially these are simply tax-deferred “checking” accounts set aside for medical expenses “coupled with” a Higher Deductible Health insurance plan. You choose an amount you or your family can handle on your own (the deductible) and the insurance company pays the rest! The amount you chose to handle can be funneled into a Health Savings Account. The money in this account can pay for medical expenses TAX FREE.
Traditional plans with high deductibles and co-pays for doctor visits or prescriptions are also the products of choice by many. These plans are for those who tell me “they want to get something for their money”. They feel they will never meet high deductibles of catastrophic coverage; they at least want prescription and/or doctor visits covered with a $20 or $30 co-pays. They still might have higher deductibles and out of pockets like the Health Savings Account insurance plans, but on the smaller things they will have coverage immediately.
My thoughts on this are that either plan chosen by clients still reflect the principals for health insurance we have always espoused from this agency. The definition of the word insurance is “protection against loss”. Each person must assume what that means for them. They then must “cover or insure” that part that they can’t handle personally so that they will feel the security they need for themselves or their family.
High deductibles are here to stay for major medical expense. Three, four, or five thousand dollars will no longer bankrupt most families anymore. Keeping those numbers as a base, there is no reason we can not help those eligible for health insurance coverage keep their premiums affordable.
Donald E. Ridinger
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