Liz Weston
speaker
110 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Liz Weston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And here's our brief disclaimer. We are not financial or investment advisors. This nerdy info is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes and may not apply to your specific circumstances.
Sean, did you just yay open enrollment? Sarcastically. Oh, okay. Well then, yes. Yay. And I'm confident in predicting that nobody actually says that at this time of year.
John, you're spinning out, as we all want to do during open enrollment. And for those who aren't following along too closely, open enrollment is that time of year, typically anywhere from October to mid-December.
when people in employer-sponsored health plans and public and private health plans, including through Affordable Care Act exchanges, get to choose their individual and family plans for the coming year. Right, and we are smack in the middle of that right now. It's kind of like tax time in April and sometimes just as confusing.
Exactly right. And we as a populace are not too good at making the right choices. In one study, more than 80% of the employees at a Fortune 100 company picked the wrong health insurance plans. They went with low deductible options that ultimately cost them more.
Another study found that inertia, sticking with the same plan rather than evaluating the options each year and choosing a better one, cost workers an average $2,032 annually.
So get a cup of coffee and get out your plan options, and we'll see if we can help you sort it all out. Today, it's healthcare. Episode two, we're covering all kinds of other insurance, including disability. And episode three, we're talking about vision, dental, pet care, and more. I mean, how bad can it be? We're talking about benefits.
Well, we're going to lead off with health insurance because that is the biggest challenge for most people in terms of the breadth of options to choose from and the math they have to do to figure out what's best for them and their families. And for this, we're going to talk with our fellow nerd, Kate Ashford.
She's written about health insurance for years, and she's a certified senior advisor who covers Medicare and retirement topics for NerdWallet. Kate, so glad you could join us on Smart Money.
So when you hear the words open enrollment, what happens in your brain?
Yeah, for me, it's basically a trigger to run away to Europe for a month or two to avoid the whole thing. But all jokes aside, this is serious business and incredibly complex, so let's start with some of the real basics. We hear these terms all the time, but it doesn't mean that we really understand them. So Kate, how about explaining premiums and deductibles for us?
And this is really like a seesaw, right, in that most plans either have higher premiums that you pay monthly or high deductibles that mean you're paying a potentially higher bill if you end up using a lot of your insurance. So how do individuals and families go about deciding which part of the seesaw they should be on?
This always feels like such a hard thing to figure out because you're almost being asked to predict what's going to happen to your health in a given year. If you feel like you're healthy, you might take the higher deductible thing thinking you'll never have to pay it.
But then you have some sort of a health crisis or an accident and suddenly you're on the hook for all of it before the insurance kicks in. Is that a fair assessment?
Yes. And also, if you would put off care because you have to pay for it, that's another reason not to use a high deductible plan. Absolutely. I know this is a thing. It's just something that psychologically, if you could be prone to that, then maybe get the lower deductible plan and make sure you're getting the health care that you need.
Yeah. We'll get to some of the details about health savings accounts in the second half of the show because you mentioned those. But let's talk about the kind of second tier sort of decisions. which is looking at co-pays, co-insurance, and out-of-pocket maximums. All of these have potential to show up in a variety of plans that are offered to most people.
So give us a rundown of what they mean, especially co-pay versus co-insurance.
And how do you go about evaluating where these fit into your decision making? I mean, high deductible with low co-pays, low deductible with high out of pocket. We're doing a lot of math here, aren't we?
Oh, and I was really looking forward to rewatching Arcane. Anyway, speaking of Arcane, let's move on to the alphabet soup of healthcare options. PPOs, HMOs, HDHPs, C3POs. Let's take them one at a time. What is an HMO and what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of choosing this?
Well, that's good to know. Okay, same question for PPOs. What are they and who might they be right for?
Showing 61–80 of 110 · page 4 of 6
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