How to be a smart health insurance shopper during open enrollment

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It’s open enrollment—time to pick next year’s insurance—for folks who buy it on their own and for many of us in our jobs. Here’s what you’re aiming for. Via KHNews:

It’s open enrollment — time to pick next year’s insurance — for folks who buy it on their own and for many of us in our jobs. Lots of us aren’t sure we know how to pick, and research shows: We’re not wrong.

But getting that monthly payment as close to zero as possible? Probably not your best move. Not if it puts you at risk of a horror story you could avoid. • The deductible is how much you shell out before your insurance covers much of anything. The amount can be absurdly high. If your plan has a $7,000 deductible, ask yourself, “Where would I get hold of seven grand?”

• OPX stands for out-of-pocket maximum and it’s a key number: It puts a cap on how much you could pay in a given year.For the math, you’re going to want to make a spreadsheet. Maybe open yourself a beer first.1. What does this plan cost me in a normal year? Because remember that key term, “out-of-pocket maximum”? Well, in a lot of plans — including everything on the Obamacare exchanges — this threshold applies only for in-network providers.

“Your plan could have different deductibles,” she said. “It could have a general deductible, it could have a pharmaceutical deductible, it could have a hospital deductible.”Of course, the answer was: Looking pretty sad.I was, like: What do IP and OP even stand for? Just getting the answer to that required a couple of tries-and-misses with Google on my part — and I report on this stuff full time.

For the rest of us, here’s a place to find actual human beings near you whose job it is to explain this stuff. Note that you’ll find two types of folks listed:

 

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