If you want to buy your own health insurance, you can save a lot of time and money by doing your research and comparing policies online. Sites that give quotes on different kinds of insurance make it easy to get an idea of what your coverage will be and how much it will cost. But please know that there are some problems with using an insurance broker, as I've learned in the past year.
Since I work for myself, I pay for my family's health and life insurance myself. I knew two things about our health insurance when we moved from New Jersey to North Carolina in 2004:
I'd have to look around for a health insurance company that covers North Carolina.
- Rates would be lower than in New Jersey, about half of what I was paying, and coverage would be a little bit better.
A few weeks before we moved, I got quotes from a well-known insurance broker on the internet. We chose one company, and about ten days before our move, the broker sent us the paperwork. I wish I had started the process a little earlier, because all of our free time was spent getting ready for and making the move. So, I packed the paperwork with my personal belongings and wasn't able to fill it out and send it in until a week after we got to North Carolina.
Dealing with the online insurance broker was easy, but I soon found out that they were just an extra step in the application process that slowed down our approval.
Once the broker got the paperwork, they let us know via email that they got it and that they would review it before sending it to the health insurance company.
Over the next few weeks, the insurance broker sent us messages saying the following:
- We are going over your application right now.
Your application has been sent to the insurance company.
- Please don't talk to the insurance company directly; we'll let you know how your application is going. Sure, sure.
- Because there are so many applications, the insurance company thinks it will take longer to look at yours.
- The insurance company has your application and will look at it in about a week.
At first, the insurance broker told us that the health insurance company would look over our application and approve it in two weeks. We called the broker again and had a few emails back and forth with him, which showed that this wasn't going to happen. Also, when we called the health insurance company directly, as the broker had suggested, the company had a hard time finding our application. Within a few days, the application was found in another department. Our contact at the health insurance company said that the broker sent the information to the wrong address.
As it turned out, the first online insurance quote we got was off by a little more than 20%. Once our health insurance company decided that some pre-existing conditions had to be taken into account, our rates went up. We knew that the quoted rate wasn't "absolute" when we worked with the internet broker, but the big jump was still hard to take.
At that point in the process, some of the things we were thinking were:
- If we had known that our "final rate" would be so high, we would have done more shopping around.
- Because of the delays and the passage of time, we had to finish the application process because our coverage with the NJ health provider had to be cancelled, preferably by the end of the year.
Ten weeks after we turned in our paperwork, in the middle of December, we got official word that our application was approved and that we were covered. During the last couple of weeks of the long application process, we called the health insurance company directly several times to find out where our application was at. We were never sure that we would be approved during the process. Instead, we were told that coverage would start if we were approved.
In conclusion, here are some tips on how to shop for health insurance:/b>
- Pick the top three companies on the list, and then get in touch with them directly. Don't use a broker because they are an extra step that isn't needed in a process that is already not quick.
- Shop online and compare prices. You can get a general idea of what your costs will be by getting quotes from online brokers. If you already have a health problem, the prices quoted won't show up in your quote.
- If you need insurance by a certain date, you should apply for it well in advance to leave time for delays, lost paperwork, changes to your application, etc. Our insurance coverage was approved for a certain date, but we were able to move it to a different date so that it would work with the end of our NJ health care provider.
Overall, the experience was sometimes hard to handle and really opened my eyes. I know you see ads for online insurance quotes all the time. I'm not telling you to stay away from the sites, but please think about what we went through before we only used online brokers.
