If you really want lower the cost of your health care there is only one way. Trying to get a discount by finding the cheapest of the full benefit "cover every dollar" health insurance plans is just not going to save you enough!

Consider the way insurance was originally designed. Insurance was designed to cover the major unexpected costs. Such costs were, unpredictable, uncontrollable, infrequent, and expensive. A person was expected to take care of the routine, predictable, and frequent medical services themselves.

If you design an insurance to take care of the routine and frequent things, it will get overutilized and costs will go up. That is only one of the reasons and is an oversimplification of why health care costs are skyrocketing, but there is a connection. It is like having auto insurance to cover the cost of a tune-up!

Now that costs are so high even for the little stuff, what is the solution?

The Solution is to get a combination of health care programs. By separating the catastophic from the routine, and having separate programs for each one; money is saved. There are programs to take care of the inpatient catastrophic costs and programs to substantially reduce your outpatient costs of doctor visits, prescriptions, lab work, x-ray, CT scans, MRI and much more! Together the insurance and healthcare savings program cost much less than than a typical health insurance plan--HMO, or PPO.

• Give you greater flexibility and quality in your healthcare, because now many more of your healthcare decisions will be between you and your doctor and won't require insurance company approval.
• Your overall catastrophic hospital expense exposure will be less than under a regular PPO plan. (See below--under "How It Works".)
• If 6 months to a year go by and rates on health plans are raised, a program put together like this concept won't increase nearly as much. Your overall monthly program cost will be much more stable for a much longer time!
• You'll start saving on monthly program costs now!

As you saw above there are some situations where you may pay even LESS for medical services under the new approach, but there are also times when you would pay more. However, consider that if you are saving anywhere from $100 to $550 or more per month on the insurance costs (depending on your age), that is $1,200 to $6,600 annually in savings. If you ended up utilizing more services than expected and had to pay out $1,000 or so more for medical services than you would have under the traditional plan, then so what? You paid much less in monthly premiums. That means at worst you hopefully broke even, and at best you still saved between $200 to $5,600 or more annually.