These insurance products are guaranteed issues so your individual health history does not come into play in the same way it does for an individual health insurance plan. It more affects the cost for the entire group versus anyone individual employees. On average it runs for an employee and about a month for a family plan. You might ask why so much when individual Florida health insurance plans are about one-third of the cost of Florida group health insurance policy. The answer is it’s a guaranteed issue. You could have cancer heart issues and take 5 media days but as long as you met the eligibility requirements for a Florida group health insurance plan you would be covered.
Think of it like going to your local car dealership, and the finance manager gives you two options either they can run your credit and offer you interest or they do not run your credit but you would have to pay a percent interest rate,
while group health insurance is like paying interest on the used car. It usually is only a good deal for those that are sick and in use of paramount medical services on a routine basis.
Florida Groups of One Health Insurance Plans
A lot of sole proprietors in Florida work by themselves and of course have a difficult time qualifying for Florida group health insurance plans without any other eligible employees. So what the Florida insurance Commissioner has done is set up an annual open enrollment where Florida business owners can set up a group health insurance plan with just one eligible enrollee. You must apply in the month of August for October the first effective date. This is the only time of the year when you can set up a group of one in Florida.
The cost for a group of one in Florida starts at a month approximately. You may find a few plans around or even maybe but these are few and far between. Usually, a self-employed businessperson in Florida is looking at a group of one usually due to a preexisting condition issue.
Sometimes it works to where a client has a major heart issue or recent cancer treatment and can’t qualify for an individual health insurance plan so they go with the group of one medical plan since it will cover them with any preexisting conditions as long as they’ve had prior creditable coverage.
Limited Benefit Plans
The most popular marketers of these types of plans are AIM Health Plans and Cinergy. These are not actually health insurance, these plans aren’t even governed by the Department of Insurance, so if you have any problems with the plan you need to go to your state attorney general to get any assistance. These are two-part plans. First, most of them include some kind of discount card through Multiplan or Beech Street PPO network. So if you have one of these kinds of plans and your doctor is in the discount or limited benefit network you’re supposed to get the discounted rate the doctor agreed to charge for clients of the discount card company.
The discount card portions of the plan cover things such as doctor’s visits, lab bloodwork, and any hospital stays. Basically what it does is give you a discount like a coupon where you save so much off your bill if you can pay your doctor the balance at the point of service. For example, the doctor is part of the discount card network and gives clients a discount,
if you normally are charged a hundred dollars for an office visit with a discount card a client potentially would only pay for the visit just for illustration purposes. And the second part of the pine is called an indemnity insurance reimbursement, this is simply a fixed amount such as for an office visit or a day per hospital admissions that is paid directly to the client. As you can see this is not insured in the sense that when
most clients think of health insurance they think of a plan that will cover most of their major expenses. That’s why they call these limited benefits or while these plans have their place in a limited number of situations they are not an alternative to having major medical health insurance in place, but they could be better than nothing if someone cannot get short-term health insurance or even the government’s PCIP plan.