If someone has never bought health insurance before, are their tips to help them?

Host: If someone has never bought health insurance before, do you have any tips that might help them?

Bob Hurley: Most of us have grown up in families where the health insurance was provided by certainly, by our parents and it was provided by our parents' employer or Government Agency that they work or whatever and so most of us have grown up in families where a health insurance wasn't talked about very much. If somebody got sick, they got taken off to the doctor and there really wasn't a whole lot of discussion about what kind of coverage we had or how much it cost or anything else and that's part of problem frankly that we are in today and why a health insurance and healthcare are so expensive. In some cases is the consumer, you and I, haven't been engaged in the process of, actually buying our own healthcare. So some tips for buying health insurance for a person that has never done it before, number one, you need to go out and learn about it. The internet is a good place to do that. You can go to our website and there is a lot of frequently asked questions where you can see the answers. There are hyperlinks on most of the words on our site so that if you went across a word that you don't understand you can click on it and get a definition of that word. So a good thing to do is go to the internet, type in health insurance on one of the search engines and often times, you will be brought to our website anyway and you can start the learning process of learning about health insurance.

You are going to need to learn about deductibles and how they work and by the way, deductibles in health insurance work very much like your deductibles in car insurance. So you actually, already know a little bit deductibles from your car insurance coverage so it's very much the same in health insurance. But you are also going to learn about HMO's or Health Maintenance Organizations and you are going to learn about PPO's and how those work? Believe me, once you get into the system and you start utilizing your care and utilizing your product and your health insurance plan, you are going to get very good at this. We can all learn once we get into it on how they work. I think it's important though as you are buying that you want to try to stick with one of the brand names especially if you have never bought a health insurance before you and you really don't know much about how to go about it, then you want to zero in on the brand name of health insurance companies and that's simply so that you don't get into something that is not a true health insurance product.

There are some products out there. There are discounts cards and others products out there that limit your benefits and so on. Those products all have a place in the market, but if you are new with this I would stick with your known brands like United Health and Blue Cross, Kaiser, the name brands that you recognize in your specific area are going to be insurance companies that are going to be there when you need them.

So I would stick with some of the brand names as this is new to you and then finally, if you have any questions and you are shopping on the internet, you have found in the internet that site that has a lot of the brand names but you still have some questions, pick up the phone, dial the number associated with that website, we have an 800 number that you can use and you can talk to a licensed health insurance representative and I think that's very important because these people are licensed by the state that they are work in. They are going to be able to answer any questions that you have related to the health plan that you are considering. How it works? What the benefits are? How the pricing works? Any of those terms that you are still not clear on, they can answer those questions. Get all of those questions answered before you actually buy for the first time your health insurance plan. Once you have done all of that homework I really, sincerely believe that you can rest assured that you have bought something that's going to be there for you in the future. It's going to cover you if something bad happens and it's going to give you access to routine preventative care that you might need. So you are going to be setup financially for managing your own healthcare.