Health Insurance

Health Insurance

Health Insurance

Personal health insurance is a health insurance coverage designed to cover either an individual or a family. While health insurance can often be obtained through an employer, personal health insurance refers to insurance that is bought by the individual. There are two main ways to purchase personal health insurance, the health insurance exchange or off-exchange directly from the health insurance carrier or a third-party health insurance agent.

Although personal health insurance is individually-purchased insurance, it has some restrictions that make it different from other types of individually purchased insurance. This is because the accessibility of individual health insurance plans increased greatly under the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), which also set up certain guidelines for how people can access it.

One of the features of the ACA is that individual plans can be purchased during an open enrollment period (OEP), making it similar to the enrollment periods in employee-sponsored health plans. In addition, plans under the ACA are more comprehensive than they were prior to 2014, when individual health plans routinely offered lower levels of coverage than group-sponsored plans. The ACA has guaranteed coverage and offers subsidies, which can make healthcare affordable for people who could not have previously paid for individual health coverage.

Finding the right health plan means taking into account a number of factors, including your desired monthly payments, co-pay amounts, yearly deductible amounts, and out-of-pocket maximums. The right plan often depends upon your overall health and whether you are anticipating needing any expensive procedures during the coming year. Because it can be difficult to find the right plan, having the help of a professional insurance agent can be critical. Contact Capstone today to get matched with an agent that can help you make the right choice for your health insurance.