3.5 million Californians would be eligible for healthcare tax credits, study finds

 

By Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times

October 5, 2010|3:54 p.m.

The federal credits, provided under the nation’s healthcare overhaul, would help low- and middle-income people slash the cost of coverage through a new state health insurance marketplace.

 

An estimated 3.5 million Californians would be eligible for federal tax credits to slash the cost of their health coverage when they begin buying policies through a new statewide insurance marketplace in 2014, a study released Tuesday found.

Under the nation’s healthcare overhaul, tax credits will be available to low- and middle-income people once insurers begin selling policies through state-based insurance exchanges like the one being set up in California.

The federal law requires most Americans to have insurance starting in 2014. The credits that help pay insurance costs will go directly to insurers, lowering premiums for those who are uninsured or do not have coverage through jobs.

In California, working families stand to gain most from the tax credits, analysts from the consumer group Families USA concluded. The researchers said that 94% of those who qualify would come from families that have at least one employed person.

The tax credits, the group said, would be worth an estimated $13.8 billion in 2014.

“These premium tax cuts will enable many hard-working Californians to afford health insurance,” said Kathleen Stoll, the group’s deputy executive director. “They put significant extra cash into Californians’ pocketbooks and provide real, concrete relief.”

An insurance industry spokesman agreed that the tax credits would help lower insurance premiums but said the subsidies would do nothing to stem the fundamental problem of rising healthcare expenses.

“Premiums are going up because medical costs continue to soar,” said Robert Zirkelbach of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobbying arm in Washington.

“If underlying costs are allowed to continue to increase, it’s going to require significantly larger tax credits to afford coverage. By addressing medical costs, it’s possible to make coverage more affordable and reduce the financial burden on the government.”

duke.helfand@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

 

Number of uninsured Americans hits record high

Latest Census report shows 50.7 million people don’t have health insurance

In a reflection of the battered economy, the number of people without health insurance rose sharply last year to 50.7 million — an all time high — according to data released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

That pushed the rate of uninsured Americans to 16.7 percent last year from 15.4 percent in 2008, when there were 46.3 million uninsured. It was one of the largest single year increases since the Census starting tracking the figure in 1987.

Nearly every demographic and geographic group posted a rise in the uninsured rate—with the exception of children, who remained stable at about 10 percent. The sharpest jumps were in the Midwest and South, although all areas of the country saw increases.

“In a word, this is devastating,” said Jonathan Oberlander, professor of social medicine and health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Both Democrats and Republicans hoped to gain public support from the new figures.

The surge in the uninsured could help Democrats gain more support for the new health overhaul law because it underscores the need for dramatically changing the health system.

But at the same time, Republicans calling for repeal of that law can use the report to blame Democrats for failing to fix the economy.

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“Though not surprising, the uninsured numbers do indicate the role of the dismal economy,” said Joseph Antos, a health policy expert from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Health insurance is really secondary to the economy.”

Although in the short term the report could hurt Democrats,  the higher uninsured numbers should make it harder for Republicans to talk about repealing the health law, said Oberlander.

“From a political standpoint,” he said, “the report makes the administration’s and Democrats’ point that the status quo is not sustainable and underscores why you needed to do something to stabilize insurance.”

The health law approved in March mandates that nearly all Americans have health insurance. It would provide coverage to 32 million more Americans starting in 2014 as the state-federal Medicaid program is expanded and lower income people get government subsidies to buy coverage through new insurance exchanges or marketplaces.

The jump in uninsured last year reflects the worsening recession, which started in 2008 but ravaged the economy in 2009. The unemployment rate rose to 9.3 percent in 2009 from 5.8 percent in 2008.

“A lot of it is due to changes in people’s employment status as people moved from full time to part time and from working to not working,” said David Johnson, chief of the housing and household economic statistics division at the Census Bureau.

Analysts said they were not surprised by the big increase in uninsured.

“We’ve reached yet another milestone in the number of uninsured,” said Peter Cunningham, senior fellow at the Center for Studying Health System Change, an independent, nonpartisan think tank. “It’s not surprising because it’s being driven almost entirely by a big drop in people with private coverage and employer-sponsored coverage.”

The percent of people covered by employer-sponsored coverage dropped to 55.8 percent last year from 58.5 percent in 2008.

The Census report showed there were 43.6 million people in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008 — the third consecutive annual increase.

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“The numbers are heartbreaking,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University. “If we needed any more evidence of the absolute imperative of health reform, this is it.”

Indeed, the reliance in America on an employer-based delivery system for health coverage means that the population is susceptible to such explosions of the number of uninsured when unemployment increases, Rosenbaum added. Often, Medicaid — meant to provide coverage for the nation’s poor — can’t cover many of these newly uninsured, she explained, because strict qualifications exclude many middle class families who lose their jobs and take unemployment benefits.

And it may not get better anytime soon. Rosenbaum said that there will probably be at least one more year with “terrible” health insurance numbers as the economy lags and employers continue to lay workers off.

The report also found that nearly a third of Americans — about 93 million — are now covered by government insurance, mainly Medicare and Medicaid.  While the numbers of people on Medicare remains stable, the percentage of people covered by Medicaid, the federal-state program for people with low incomes, rose from to 15.7 of Americans from 14.1. Nearly 48 million Americans are in Medicaid programs.

Given the sharp divide in public opinion of the new health law, many Democrats have been reluctant to talk about the health law on the campaign trail. That probably won’t change, even with these new figures, said Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.

“They’re not going to go back to it. If they’ve run [from the new law in their campaigns] they’re not going to pull a U-turn and embrace it.” And voters, Baker said, are unlikely to be more receptive to health reform now because they still simply don’t understand what it means for them.

Indeed, the other danger for Democrats going into November’s midterm elections is that “any bad stat is going to reflect poorly on the incumbent,” Baker said.

Amber Hergen, 34, of Los Angeles, is one of those Americans who lost coverage last year. She left her publicity job at a marketing company, where she had insurance, to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. She’s been unable to find affordable individual coverage.

She learned the risk of being uninsured last month when she went to the emergency room after accidentally ingesting a household cleaner. Though she was at the hospital less than an hour, her bill was $2,500.

“Being without insurance is kind of like walking on a tightrope without a net,” she said. “It’s scary.”

© 2010 This information was reprinted with permission from KHN. KHN is an editorially independent news service and a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy organization that isn’t affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Financial Tricks, the Deficit and the Health Care Bill

- The Speakers Lobby – http://congress.blogs.foxnews.com -

Posted By Jim Angle On July 8, 2010 @ 5:49 pm In Congress |

President Obama made one unshakable pledge about the health care bill. As the debate began, he said last fall, “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.

But it took some financial tricks to keep that pledge.

For instance, the bill originally included money to prevent Medicare doctors from suffering a scheduled 21 percent cut in fees. But it cost too much — $275 billion.

So John Graham of the Pacific Research Institute says “the way they solved that is that they simply pulled out the deficit increase in the bill, which was the so called Medicare doc fix.

And former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Holtz Eakin, adds “It turns out it’s very very expensive. That’s a pretty hefty price tag and not shockingly, they kept it completely out of health care reform, choosing to ignore this big bill.”

Congress won’t ever let the fee cut take effect because seniors would be outraged.

And the cost of the $275 billion “doc fix” eclipses the projected savings in the law– about $140 billion — meaning the that alone would push the cost of the health care law $135 billion dollars into the red, breaking the President’s pledge.

But that wasn’t the only financial shortcut. The law added dozens of other things, but Congress did not appropriate a single dollar to pay for them.

For instance, the IRS will have massive new responsibilities. “It’s going to have to hire many many thousands of bureaucrats in the Internal Revenue Service, says John Graham, to determine whether you should be fined because you don’t have appropriate health coverage.”

The IRS would also have to determine who qualifies for subsidies and how much, which is all based on one’s income.

The Congressional Budget Office says paying for all the things Congress passed but didn’t fund would add as much as another $115 billion to the deficit– driving the total red ink up to $250 billion over the first 10 years.

“They say very clearly that the bill did not change the basic growth rate of national health care expenditure,” says Holtz Eakin. “So we’ve got one of the key principles of health care reform, which is that it should provide same care at lower cost nowhere in sight.”

But Jim Kessler of the moderate democratic think tank “Third Way” says we do get something for all that

” You have to remember there are 30 million more people who are insured at that point.”

And that drives up national health expenditures, according to government officials. In fact, total National Health Care Expenditures will actually increase by $310 billion by 2019.

Another factor is that the baby boomers are getting older and using more health care.

So more people will get more coverage but that too threatens to add to the deficit.

“The cost per capita of health care coverage in the United States will drop, but more will be covered by Washington than in the past,” says Jim Kessler, “because we’re insuring people that in the past just didn’t pay their bills.”

And the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says all that will increase increase federal spending in the next 10 years and for most of the following decade.

Lawmakers are still arguing over whether the health care law will improve health care or make it worse. But it seems clear it will not reduce spending –either for the nation or the federal government.

Article printed from The Speakers Lobby: http://congress.blogs.foxnews.com

URL to article: http://congress.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/07/08/financial-tricks-the-deficit-and-the-health-care-bill/

Copyright © 2009 The Speakers Lobby. All rights reserved.

Aetna withdraws filing for California rate hike

Lewis Krauskopf

NEW YORK

Fri Jun 25, 2010 11:34am EDT

(Reuters) – Health insurer Aetna Inc has withdrawn its filing for rate increases in California after “substantial mathematical errors” were found, according to state regulators.

Health

Aetna, whose shares fell more than 2 percent, is the second major health insurer, after WellPoint Inc, to withdraw its rate filing request in the most populous U.S. state after errors were found.

State rate filings have come under greater scrutiny across the country. President Barack Obama warned insurers on Tuesday not to use the recently passed healthcare overhaul as a opportunity to push through big rate increases.

Aetna’s filing would have increased rates by an average of 19 percent on its 65,000 policyholders, according to the California Department of Insurance.

During an internal actuarial review, Aetna found a miscalculation that it attributed to a “simple human error,” the company said in a statement. It said it informed the California insurance department as soon as it found the mistake.

The No. 3 U.S. health insurer said it had not yet implemented the proposed rate changes and that there was no impact to its members with individual health plans in California.

WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross unit in April withdrew its filing to raise rates by an average of 25 percent in California. Democrats had strongly criticized the company’s proposed rate hike as they rallied support to pass the health reform law.

California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said he would post future individual health insurance filings on the department’s website, calling the move an “exceptional step” that he hoped would increase pressure on insurers to avoid errors.

“Given that two of the four major health insurers have provided rate filings containing math errors, I believe an additional level of transparency is warranted,” Poizner said in a statement.

‘If You Like Your Health Care Plan, Too Bad!’

“If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.”

Throughout the long health care reform debate, that promise from President Obama was one of the few constants, made to reassure the bulk of Americans who already have insurance that the sweeping legislation would not have a downside. Just Tuesday, Obama tried to counter critics who say the new law contains a slew of unintended consequences. Announcing a fresh set of new insurance rules, he called the regulations “a true patients’ bill of rights” and insisted that they are “not punitive.

But now that regulations about existing employer-sponsored plans have been issued, it’s becoming clear that many of the 160 million Americans with job-based coverage will not, in fact, be able to keep what they currently have.

Republican critics of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act point to the Obama Administration’s own estimates that by 2013, 39% to 69% of employer plans will be subject to new regulations and not grandfathered in, or exempted from the new rules. House minority leader John Boehner issued a press release about the new regulations with the headline “New ObamaCare Tagline Should Be ‘If You Like Your Health Care Plan, Too Bad.’ “

That partisan rhetoric may be heated, but it’s not entirely off base. The truth is that employer-based plans, which many assumed would easily be categorized as grandfathered, will be subject to the full regulatory thrust of the new law if they are altered in ways that are standard practice in the industry. Plans that increase the percentage of costs patients must pay out of pocket — known as co-insurance — lose their grandfathered status. The same is true for plans that significantly decrease the percentage that employers contribute to premiums or those that significantly increase deductibles or co-payments. An employer that switches health-insurance providers also loses its grandfathered status. These kinds of changes are common year to year in the current marketplace, since employers are constantly looking for ways to limit their expenses in the face of rising costs.

Still, while many employer-based plans will be snared in the regulatory net of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, many of those with this coverage could actually stand to benefit. The new regulations, after all, are designed to protect consumers. If job-based plans have to change — and are not dropped by employers — they will do so in ways that limit what workers have to pay out of pocket and what insurers can refuse to cover. (Full coverage for preventive services is one new regulation that would kick in, for instance, along with a government-designated “essential benefits package” of procedures and treatments that must be covered.) Plus, it’s not as though the employer-based insurance market is reliable and stable in its current form. Most employees don’t have any control over the structure of their health insurance. As a result, coverage has been steadily eroding in the past decade, with premium costs for workers increasing 131% from 1999 to 2009, even as the actuarial value of those plans, on average, decreased.

Republican critics, including Boehner, have focused much of their ire toward the new grandfathering provisions on behalf of small businesses, insisting that these companies will be forced to drop coverage if they’re required to meet new regulatory standards. But less than half of employees in firms with 200 or fewer workers currently get coverage through their jobs, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

What Boehner doesn’t mention is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provides tax credits to the smallest of these businesses — those with 25 or fewer employees — and exempts those with fewer than 50 employees from providing health insurance at all. In the face of grandfathering provisions that make it all but impossible for many of these companies to maintain this protection, along with the lack of a mandate that they offer coverage, it’s likely many of these small companies won’t offer coverage by the time the act fully takes hold in 2014. Their workers would likely be funneled into the “exchanges,” regulated marketplaces where individuals can buy insurance independently, albeit with after-tax income rather than pre-tax dollars, as job-based coverage is paid for. But this too has an upside; the more Americans who shop for coverage in the exchanges, the more insurers will compete to get their business and the more empowered consumers will be to choose their own plans.

It will be years before it’s clear exactly how much the employer-based health-insurance system will be upended, and only then will consumers know precisely how costs will be affected. It’s already apparent, however, that protecting the current system of private job-based insurance was not a mission of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, promises about keeping your plan notwithstanding.

By Kate Pickert
Thursday, Jun. 24, 2010

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1999208,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopular#ixzz0sA94nYuV

 

Obama proposes interim health protections

The regulations, all outlined in the healthcare overhaul bill, include barring insurance plans from denying coverage to children with preexisting conditions. Republicans call the rules a sales job.

Reporting from Washington —

The Obama administration issued a series of proposed regulations Tuesday that would provide interim protections for Americans until the healthcare insurance market is more fully overhauled in 2014.

President Obama, meeting at the White House with people who had been denied care, also challenged Republicans who have been trying to repeal the healthcare law.

“They want to go back to the system we had before,” Obama said from the East Room of the White House, where he signed the healthcare law 90 days ago. “I refuse to go back.”

The regulations, all of which were outlined in the original legislation, include:

• Barring insurance plans, with some exceptions, from denying coverage to children under 19 with preexisting medical conditions.

• Prohibiting insurers from rescinding coverage except in clear cases of fraud.

• Prohibiting insurance companies from imposing lifetime limits on what they will pay for care.

• Banning insurers from imposing annual limits of less than $750,000 on coverage of essential benefits including maternity care, emergency services and pharmaceuticals. (The minimum annual limit would rise to $2 million by 2014.)

• Prohibiting insurers from requiring that their customers get prior approval before getting emergency care outside the provider network.

The proposed regulations would take effect in September.

Employer-provided plans that do not make major changes to their benefits or dramatically increase cost-sharing with employees would be exempt from some of these new mandates as “grandfathered” plans.

With health insurance premiums continuing to rise, the Obama administration has been working to highlight the immediate benefits of the new healthcare law to Americans who remain skeptical of the planned overhaul.

Administration officials estimated that as many as 200,000 children and adults could benefit from the protections, not counting several million who could gain easier access to emergency care, according to an analysis accompanying the proposed regulations.

Republicans quickly condemned the rules as a sales job.

“This shouldn’t be called a healthcare bill of rights, but a bill of goods,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R- Utah) said in a statement. Hatch has sponsored legislation to repeal parts of the healthcare law.

Obama may face a bigger challenge as millions of Americans get double-digit premium increases. On Tuesday, the president explicitly warned insurance companies to restrain their rates.

“We’ve got to make sure that this law is not being used as an excuse to simply drive up costs,” Obama said after emerging from a closed-door meeting with insurance executives and state insurance regulators.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the regulations should not push up premiums by more than 1 percentage point.

Insurance officials are evaluating the proposed regulations, said Karen Ignagni, who heads America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s Washington-based lobbying arm.

Ignagni cautioned that insurers were being forced to raise premiums as medical costs climbed and healthy people dropped coverage. “Premiums are following underlying trends,” she said.

The administration is working with state officials to step up oversight of the insurance industry, although the new healthcare law does not give regulators the authority to block rate increases.

noam.levey@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

California’s car insurance near nation’s most expensive!

 

California’s car insurance is the 34th most affordable in the nation, according to a report released this week by an online insurance website.

Sacramento-based InsWeb determined car insurance affordability by dividing the median household car rate by the median household income.

Massachusetts was listed as the most affordable and Louisiana was the least.

Looking at the car insurance prices alone, Hawaii ranked 44th-most affordable with a median six-month policy price of $839.50, which is $129.75 more than the national average.

The top and bottom spots remained the same with Massachusetts car owners paying a median price of $468.75 and Louisiana residents forking over a whopping $1,226.75 check every six months.

 

Sacramento Business Journal

Read more: California’s car insurance near nation’s most expensive – Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

 

Health insurance rate increases, will get outside look!

Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer

This article appeared on page C – 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

State health regulators will hire outside analysts to review rate increases proposed by the California’s four largest health insurers, the state Department of Insurance announced Wednesday.

Reviews will be conducted on rate filings recently submitted by Blue Shield of California and Aetna, as well as future filings by Anthem Blue Cross and Health Net. Together the four insurers cover 90 percent the California consumers who buy their policies on their own, rather than through a group.

The insurance department decided to take the action after an independent audit of Anthem revealed the insurer, which had proposed boosting rates as high as 39 percent, had made numerous accounting errors in calculating those new rates. Anthem has since canceled the rate hikes, which would have affected as many as 800,000 policyholders, and has yet to submit any new rate filings.

Regulators hope that the added layer of scrutiny these audits would bring would help curb rate increases, but in reality the insurance department has little control over rates other than to make sure health insurers are spending at least 70 cents of every premium dollar on medical benefits.

But regulators said their actions have been effective. “We want to use every inch of our regulatory ability to make sure consumers pay accurate rates,” said Darrel Ng, spokesman for the department. “We try to treat insurers as similarly as possible. After Anthem had their rates analyzed in this manner, we expanded it to the other major players in the market.”

Ng also pointed out that while Anthem could submit filings for new increases, it hasn’t yet – and every month that goes by means that consumers aren’t paying higher rates. He said unlike the situation with Anthem, the department has no early warning signs that the other insurers submitted inaccurate filings.

Aetna plans submitted in March proposed rate increases for its 65,000 California consumers averaging 18.7 percent, said Cynthia Michener, spokeswoman for the insurer. She said the insurer has reviewed its calculations numerous times.

Blue Shield officials said they intend to seek rate hikes averaging about 18 percent for their 240,000 individual policyholders. Health Net has yet to propose new rates.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/16/BAJ21E068B.DTL#ixzz0r7tevVc9

 

 

Health care assistance for unemployed workers expired May 31

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar, Associated Press Writer – Sat Jun 12, 11:19 am ET

WASHINGTON – If Chuck Lacasse had gotten his pink slip four days earlier, Uncle Sam would have covered most of his family’s health insurance while he looked for a new job.

But Congress allowed emergency health care assistance for unemployed workers to expire May 31, and seems unwilling to renew it despite pleas from President Barack Obama.

Not three months after lawmakers passed his $1 trillion insurance overhaul, Obama is facing a rare defeat on health care at the hands of his own divided Democrats. Moderates have rebelled against adding billions more to the deficit in a treacherous election year.

“The same Congress that spent all this political capital trying to get people health insurance is going to take a crucial benefit away from unemployed people,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for the unemployed.

On June 4, Lacasse lost his job as advertising director for a company that makes nutritional supplements. He’ll soon have to pay the entire $1,500 monthly premium to keep his family covered under his former employer’s health insurance plan.

Until May 31, under Obama’s economic stimulus law, the government provided a 65 percent subsidy. That would have lowered his cost to $525.

“This really isn’t about welfare,” said Lacasse, 40. “It’s about buying people some time. In a position as specialized as mine, it would have been nice to know that I had some time to look for the right job.” He lives near Green Bay, Wis., with his wife and two children.

Democratic Sens. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio have introduced a measure that would allow the program to continue helping people who get laid off through Nov. 30. That would cover Lacasse.

The lawmakers, who are seeking a vote this coming week, want to attach their nearly $7 billion provision to must-pass legislation that would extend unemployment benefits and make changes in dozens of federal programs. But a similar proposal was dropped from the House-passed bill, and Senate Democratic leaders also omitted it from their version.

“I’m concerned about it,” said Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a member of the Democratic leadership. “There will be people who fall through the cracks.”

Under a 1980s law known as COBRA, laid-off workers generally can stay on their former employers health plan for up to 18 months, provided they pay the full premium plus a small administrative charge. But with family premiums averaging about $13,500, the cost is prohibitive for most people.

That changed under the 2009 stimulus bill and subsequent expansions, which provided a 65 percent federal subsidy for up to 15 months. Workers laid off through May 31 can qualify for the benefit through their former employer.

“It has been a significant program and it has helped many middle-class families to keep their health insurance at a time when maintaining health insurance was difficult because of the high rate of job loss,” said Alan Krueger, the Treasury Department’s chief economist. Official statistics on how many people were helped have yet to be compiled, but Krueger estimates that as many as one-third of eligible unemployed workers enrolled in subsidized coverage.

Melanie Miller, 34, who suffers from debilitating neurological problems, said the COBRA program allowed her to maintain her independence after losing her ad agency job. “Without the subsidy, I probably would have had to move back and live in my mother’s house in the basement,” said Miller, an artist who lives in Philadelphia.

With the unemployment rate hovering just under 10 percent and with 15 million people looking for work, advocates say it’s premature to withdraw assistance.

“We’re recovering, but we haven’t recovered fully,” said Casey. “Now is not the time to pull up the ladder on people who are hanging on, in some cases to the last rung.”

Some conservative Democrats, however, say they don’t understand why the government should subsidize workers who lose jobs with employer coverage and not others who are equally deserving — for example self-employed people priced out of the private market.

“You’re paying 65 percent of (one) family’s health care costs, but the neighbor next door, there’s no help for,” said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif. “So we’re picking and choosing. There’s an inequality there between our constituents.” Not to mention that Congress has treated the program as emergency spending, adding its cost to the deficit.

In Marietta, Ohio, boiler operator Neil Davis is facing the loss of his job as the coal-burning power plant he works at prepares to shut down for good. Davis, 33, has marketable skills but he’s unsure how quickly he’ll be able to find comparable work. His wife is a stay-at-home mom raising two elementary-age children.

“Being able to have coverage at an affordable rate, we wouldn’t be afraid to take the kids to the doctor if they get sick,” said Davis. “The economy might be getting better some place, but I don’t know where at.”

___

Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.

Taking Healthcare matters into your own hands!

How consumers shop for health insurance is changing. Advancements in technology make it possible for Insurance brokers, like Northern Insurance Services Inc., to make it easy for consumers to buy a made-to-order health insurance plan. With the many resources available, insurance agents can lay out all your options so you can make a qualified decision on what coverage is best for you. Shopping for insurance has never been easier, and yet many misconceptions still exist.

For example:

Misconceptions

1.    The best insurance plans are provided by your employer.

False: Your employer provides the best plan they can offer taking their own budget into consideration. Many times you can find a policy that offers more suitable coverage for the same premium or less.

2.    I can’t afford to find my own insurance.

False: You can shop around and find an insurance plan you can afford. Even if it offers less than optimal coverage, it is far better than not having insurance in an emergency.

 

Shopping online for Health Coverage is a growing trend in how consumers shop for health insurance. In an economy where people are losing jobs and budgets are tight, Northern Insurance Services inc., with over 50 years of experience and its helpful licensed agents, can help you find an insurance plan that meets your needs and fits your budget.

For more information visit Northern Insurance Service Inc. on the web or speak to a licensed agent at 1-800-227-6474