How to Pick the Right Health Insurance Policy When Pregnant

Transcript

Question from Bikyo. Do you recommend choosing an HSA high deductible plan when you know you will give birth in that given year?

As someone who’s giving birth, I’m actually not giving birth in this year, but my wife will be giving birth this year. Yeah, it’s really interesting. And a lot of people are surprised. It just comes down to mathematics, right? So when you go through open enrollment, you’re looking at your different options. You have your high deductible option, and then you might have your PPO option, and you might have some other option available to you. What you really need to do is go estimate what the costs are going to be for you next year.

Now, in my experience, when you’re going through, like having a baby, they tell you right in the front, and this is going to be the total cost. Like I got a bill, like the second appointment, here’s what this is going to cost, right? If everything goes according to plan, so you can kind of like use that number, and then you figure out how much are doctors visits, and then what’s the postnatal stuff all going to be? And you figure out, okay, if I do the high deductible plan, and I save money on the premiums, but I’m having to pay more of the cost, but then I get a tax benefit from the HSA contribution, and my coming out better, than if I pay more on the premium for the Cadillac plan, but I have better insurance covers. And you literally just line those two up right next to each other, factoring in all those variables, and figure out, okay, which one is the most advantageous for my situation? And a lot of people are surprised that the election or selection you make on your health insurance might not stay the same every year. You might find yourself, okay, next year, having a baby, doing this one. Year after that, man, my family doesn’t get sick at all. I don’t need to do that. I can do the high deductible, and I can go to the HSA, but it’s something worth, just not being lazy and defaulting to whatever you did last year, because I can’t have a significant impact on your financial situation.

I would be curious, and Rebie, you can answer too. Maybe this is too personal to ask, but because I know that they do get, what’s the number, what does having a baby cost these days? Oh, it’s not too personal. I mean, I think our system are actually, yeah, I want to say, I want to say like all in cost was like five or six grand, so it was right in between five or six. That’s right, out of pocket, when they give you kind of the insurance, so like if you’re deductible, a high deductible plan is fine. Other than that, I would probably be worth it, yeah. So this is, and this is why this is a great question. Is this bike yo, is that the name? Bike yo. That’s what it says, yes.

So here’s why this is great, because when our first child, my first child, now look, real, is this first child is in college now, so this is years ago, decades ago actually, my wife worked for a Fortune 500 company, and I still laugh about the fact, because she had the Cadillac insurance working for a Fortune 500. Our first child costs us $10. I want to hitch in the math. I mean, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not gonna get it. Just your wife, I mean that. There’s people out there that probably work for these Bitcoin. This is why it is important to do the math on this decision, is because if you have access to one of those Cadillac plans, plans like a Fortune 500 company sometimes do, is with their benefits. What I mean by that is that it was a copay. The copay was $10 for the office visit, and then they covered everything else through the Cadillac. So you can imagine that’s why, Bikyo, you should do the math on this, because you can see, because a lot of these hot anductible health insurance plans that like we offer, and most small businesses offer, they’re really discount plans. They don’t really pay for anything until you get to really catastrophic events. So when you find out that it costs $5,000, a lot of that probably is going to come from out of pocket, whereas if maybe you have, if you work for a big employer that offers Cadillac insurance, you really should go do the due diligence, because maybe it is a $10 decision, and you’re like, whoa, it had to be a lot of insurance premium savings. And in that case, you would want to be very strategic on which plan you chose for the year.

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