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Course: Financial Literacy > Unit 6
Lesson 3: Health insurance options and costsTypes of health insurance plans
Sources of health insurance plans are places where you can get coverage to help pay for medical costs. These sources can be your job, the government, or private insurance companies that offer different plans for you to choose from. Created by Sal Khan.
Want to join the conversation?
- is job insurance better then government insurance(2 votes)
- ANY insurance is better than no insurance.
The insurance you get through an employer because your union has negotiated it into your contract is probably the best. So, when you think about looking for work, see if there's a union, and you'll likely get better coverage.(11 votes)
- This content should be updated. In 20 years of work I have never had an employer who paid the full premium for the health insurance plan. They pay a large portion for sure, but in my experience sometimes up to HALF the cost is passed on to the employee. Still able to pay it with pretax money but it comes out of my salary not as part of the benefit. The benefit is simply being offered the choice to be insured through their group policy or not.(1 vote)
- Just to clarify, What is the difference between Government Insurance and Private Insure?(0 votes)
- Most healthcare insurance for typical Americans is run by private corporations that seek to make a profit for their stockholders.
Insurance for poor people is called "Medicaid". It is paid for by the taxpayers. If you're really poor, it will cover you. But: you.have.to.be.poor.
Old people's medical insurance is called "Medicare". It is paid for by a combination of government and private money. Basic medicare is paid for by taxpayers. More complete "supplements" are privately run. BUT: you.have.to.be.old.(3 votes)
Video transcript
- So there are three ways
that you might be able to get yourself health insurance. The first way is that
you just get it directly, and that would be an individual plan. You pay the premium,
you get the insurance. The second way is many employers
will provide insurance. They will pay all of the premium, or a large chunk of the premium, in certain cases, they might
even pay a large chunk, or the full premium for family members, and then the third way is the government. You have programs like Medicare for primarily senior citizens, some other cases where other
folks might qualify as well. You have Medicaid for low income folks. You have also government
programs for say, veterans. Now, as I just alluded to, probably the biggest difference is who actually makes the payment. The government programs, it's the government who's
making the premium payment. In the employer case, it's the employer, and they're doing that with
pre-tax money, which matters. They're giving this to you as a benefit and you do not pay taxes on the money that they are
paying for your insurance. Well, with an individual plan,
you pay that out of pocket. You pay that yourself. Now, if you meet certain
income guidelines, and if you pay enough of a premium above a certain percentage of your income, some of that might be tax-deductible, but it is not fully tax-deductible the same way that when
your employer pays for it, you don't have to pay any taxes on that premium that they're
providing you at all. Now, on the individual side, because you are essentially
deciding what type of insurance you want, it would give you the maximum choice. Now, in certain cases,
that choice is limited, because when you're
getting an individual plan, they're deciding what the premium is or whether to even insure you
based on your situation, whether you have pre-existing conditions, your risk factor, et cetera, while with a government
or with an employer plan, they're not looking at your
individual circumstances. With an employer, the insurance
company will say, okay, what's the average risk
of all of the employees? And if you're a higher risk employee, the employer's going
to pay the same premium for you as they're
paying for everyone else, and so you get that same coverage. One potential negative
of an employer plan is that it might be a little
bit more limited in terms of the coverage options, but that's not always the case. Finally, government, you are going to have probably more limits on what type of healthcare you might
get, but once again, they are fully paying the premium there. Last but not least, we could
talk about deductibles. Generally speaking, the government plans are going to have the lowest deductibles. In some cases, they will
have no deductibles. In the case of an employer-sponsored plan or an individual plan, it really depends on which
plan you actually get. So for a lot of folks, if you're not retired,
if you're not low income, employer-sponsored plans are
probably where you wanna go, but if your employer
doesn't offer those plans or you're self-employed and you need get that insurance yourself, then of course, individual
plans is what you need to do.