The other day I was speaking with a friend of mine who was sharing her exasperation in trying to find quality health insurance for individuals. She works out of her home, so she does not have the luxury of individual or family medical insurance that may be offered by an employer. And if you are not in a group plan, trying to find cheap health insurance these days can be as difficult as finding gold in your back yard.

When we looked at her financial situation, she did not qualify for Medicaid or Medicare because she made too much money for those programs and was still too young for Medicare. However, she was not rich either, so she could not afford what a lot of plans were priced at. Feeling  private Krankenversicherung Vergleich a bit disheartened, I decided to help her get through some researching and digging to find a way to get her insured, at a great price, and with good coverage.

We started out trying to figure out which medical insurance plans were available in our state. Once we knew that, it was a matter of then calling each insurer to see what was available to an individual looking for affordable family health insurance. We soon found out that shopping for health insurance for individuals was going to be a complicated task.

It also made us aware that we really needed to figure out what kind of insurance she really needed. Did she just want something to cover her basic annual medical expenses, doctor visits and prescriptions? Or something that maybe only covered serious illness and accidents? And did she have any existing illness that may make her a little more difficult to insure? All of these questions had to be answered.

Before she gave up hope, I decided to look for a way to do a health insurance comparison online. What we really needed was a quick and easy online method that would allow us in some basic information and get a comparison from all available insurance plans, rates, and options, and keep us from having to contact each individual health insurer individually.

We learned that having a higher deductible was a good way to lower the overall rates. That means that if something happened, she would have to pay more up front before her coverage would kick in. But that did not matter because she felt that if there was a serious accident or illness, it would still be easier to pay a large deductible than to not have coverage at all.

It was nice to be able to find an “all-in-one” health insurance quote service that got her on the right path, with the right insurer at the right price.

Private Health Insurance – The Problem With Online Tariff Calculators

On the internet, there are price comparisons for almost every kind of product or service, making it easy to save a lot of money. In most cases, shopping like that makes perfect sense, but what about your health insurance?

In this area, potential savings are huge: An online tariff calculator can find a tariff that costs thousands of dollar less than your current one. Nevertheless, you should not choose your insurance only based on the output of an online tariff calculator.

This is in part because such health insurance tariff comparison websites usually only regard the current monthly costs. But in most cases, choosing a company and tariff is a long term binding decision. Only few people want to switch again and again, worsened health prevents many from being able to choose a more attractive tariff.

Each year, most companies adjust the contributions their customers have to pay for their insurance. Contributions of different tariffs increase by different amounts. Some companies start new tariffs with very low but quickly rising contributions. The currently least expensive health insurance tariff can soon be one of the most expensive.

So the current price is only an insufficient snapshot in time. That is why it is so important to compare not only the current contributions for medical insurance but also their expected increase.

Such information about former and future adjustments of contributions, as well as about hidden co-payments, is not provided by online tariff calculators. For this you need  private Krankenversicherung Vergleich health insurance professionals with a lot of experience. These experts know insurance companies, their structure, tariffs and details. They can make realistic estimates of contribution developments and provide much more than online tariff calculators.

Of course, it is important to compare not only the cost, but also the benefits of private health insurance offers. There are big differences, not only between insurance companies but also between the tariffs of each company and the individual customization options within a tariff.