Bird my neighbor who is Dallas retired PD said he was working on medical insurance. Are they changing your medical insurance provider?
Yep, it's changing, effective the first of 2020. For a few years now, we've had a United Healthcare plan that cost me $860 a month, but we paid nothing out of pocket for doctors or hospitals. We did have copay for prescriptions, dental, and vision expenses. For next year, that plan will no longer be available. I checked to see what it would cost for the same plan, but NOT through the City and it was considerably more. Now with the "exciting" (to use the City's term) change, there are 2 PPO plans offered. The only difference being a cost of $680.07 versus $614.78 a month. They are basically the same, except with the cheaper plan, you pay $10, $20, or even $100 up front every time you go to the doctor or hospital, not quite as much copays with the more expensive plan which I decided to go with. Now supposedly, this new plan not only has some allowances for dental and vision expenses, but also some allowances for such things as $500 for hearing aids.
So up front, I'll be saving $180 a month and the new plan may turn out to be better for us, but depending on our health, it could turn out to be worse. And we didn't get the stuff in the mail from the City until a few days ago, too late for 2 of the scheduled "meetings" to tell us about it and help us get enrolled, but with 2 more scheduled. And we had to get everything done for the city by the 24th of this month, including calling one of the companies to cancel some of our current insurance effective the end of the year to avoid double billing.
And everything we got from the City failed to include any information about costs.
I found a way to get to that in their online website. And in just a little over an hour on the phone, I got us signed up for next year with a couple of very pleasant and nice ladies; one in Pennsylvania and one in Tennessee. Of course I went through a couple of others before getting to the ladies who could actually do something.
And of course, as with every year, the City reminds us that if we EVER drop the City insurance, there can be no going back to the City in the future.
