subject: Ct Health Insurance Avoiding Scams [print this page] To avoid being scammed when you buy medical insurance ascertain that you buy from a company that is accepted by your state's department of insurance, that has few complaints, is financially strong and that has will sell you a good plan.
The first and most important thing you should do when you want to buy medical insurance is to check with your state's insurance department to be sure that the company is approved to sell in your state.
Each insurance department will have different standards. Because of this, you cannot stop with this step. However, you will eliminate the worst companies from consideration by restricting the carriers you consider to carriers that have been approved by your state's insurance department.
The ratio of complaints a carrier receives to the number of contracts sold is important. Your state's insurance department should be able to help find this data.
To make sure that your department of insurance's standards are good enough, you may want to check with AM Best to see how financially stable an insurance carrier is. You get a free report on their website that includes not only AM Best's opinion of an insurance carrier's current financial stability but also A M Best's opinion of of an insurance carrier's future financial stability.
Finding out how good an insurance plan is can be more difficult than finding out how strong the carrier is. Insurance carriers sometimes sell both top notch policies and not so good ones. Another is the fact the insurance policies are inherently complex.
The percentage of plan holders who complain is a good indication of how strong the insurance carrier's contracts are. While some complaints are baseless, a carrier that has too many complaints is a company that either doesn't live up to their promises or that offers plans that don't meet their plan holder's expectations.
However, since carriers that have a low level of complaints may sell both worthwhile and lousy policies, each contract will need to be looked at as well. Things to stay away from are policies with low lifetime limits, annual limitations on benefits and limited benefits in the physician's office.
A plan's lifetime limit should be several million as a minimum unless you are sure you will be switching to another contract soon. If you are close to being eligible for Medicare a plan with a one million dollar limitation won't have much time to be ravaged by inflation. If you are under 30, a million dollar limit may not be enough when you older.
Some contracts have high lifetime limits, but limit what they will pay in a year. These policies should be avoided. They won't pay all medical bills if you have a major accident or illness.
Contracts that pay in the hospital only are not recommended either. If you have large bills in the hospital you are all but certain to also have some very major doctor bills either before or after your hospital stay. You may have both.
To avoid being scammed when you buy health insurance buying from carriers that pay their claims is important. Just as importance is purchasing a contract that meets certain standards. You will need to understand which plans limit their benefits and stay away from them if you want to avoid being scammed.
by: Alston Balkcom
welcome to Insurances.net (https://www.insurances.net)
