Every individual needs to take health insurance coverage seriously to get adequate medical care when the need arises. Besides subscribing to a best-suited health insurance plan, understanding the policy backing up your insurance plan is important. For example, as a woman, you need to know if insurance coverage will help pay for your pelvic exam to detect pregnancy and check out your vaginal & reproductive state.
Against this backdrop, many people have questions that bother on the monthly cost of healthcare insurance plans. Well, we cannot offer an answer out of the blue as several factors influence the monthly and overall costs of health insurance. A good number of them will be pointed out here in this IST Health welfare post. So, read on to be better informed on how much you would need to pay in monthly premiums for insurance coverage.
Summary
The Average Monthly Cost of Insurance Coverage
It is pretty much hard to mention a certain price that guarantees being covered by health insurance. The reason is that there are several factors at play. However, using common health insurance plans that cut across many insurance service providers would be a good idea. To this end, reports indicate that the average monthly cost (in premium) for:
- Platinum single coverage and family coverage are $732 and $1610 respectively
- Gold single coverage and family coverage are $569 and $1437 respectively
- Silver single coverage and family coverage are $483 and $1212 respectively
- Bronze single coverage and family coverage are $448 and $1041 respectively
There are several other factors at work. So, make sure to continue reading as a lot of them will be pointed out in the next section.
What Factors Determine the Monthly Cost of Insurance Plans?
Some of the factors that determine the monthly cost of insurance plans include:
Source of Health Insurance
Not every individual gets to apply directly to be covered by insurance. For some people, it is simply one of the several benefits of workers in their employer’s company. Such people make up a sizable number of consumers in the insurance marketplace and may have a bit of their income deducted for this purpose, on a monthly or annual basis.
Of course, not everyone ends up as part of the workers in such a company that would help in this regard. So, some people do not enjoy such benefits but still have affordable medical care (on their own) through insurance plans. Compared to the latter, they would likely end up paying more in premiums.
Plan and Insurance Policy
The platinum, gold, silver, and bronze health insurance plans are common insurance plans available to consumers in the marketplace. A large network of insurance services providers has these plans or something close to it for people.
Judging from monthly premiums alone, the platinum plan is the most expensive, while the bronze plan is the least expensive. But you cannot truly judge the cost of a health insurance plan by using monthly premium costs alone. For example, while bronze seems cost-effective in this regard, the irony is that its deductible and out-of-pocket are not any lower. It is higher than all the other plans.
Insurance Service Provider
Of course, there are private insurance services providers, as well as government (ACA Complaint) healthcare insurers in the marketplace. The latter usually ends up being cheaper; being that it is government subsidized. By the way, there are organized open enrollment periods for interested people to apply for such every year. Medicare is a good example and you can visit the pertinent healthcare.gov in your location for more information about it.
Location
Your zip code is taken seriously by the insurer and this plays a huge part in how much your plan will cost in premiums, deductibles, and other things that go along with it. For starters, some insurance service providers do not operate in certain locations. So, you need to be certain you are dealing with one that operates in your location.
Age and Lifestyle Factors
All things being equal, the odds are certainly more against a person who is 59 years old compared to a person who is 33 years old. The latter stands a higher chance of being healthy and this informs insurance premium for every month as the older will likely pay more than the younger.
Besides age, lifestyle factors are also key factors here. For example, tobacco smokers will most likely pay more in premiums. There are other posts in the welfare section of this website that you might find helpful. For example, you can discover if Excedrin is safe to take while pregnant in your first trimester.