Smart Ways to Deal with Rising Healthcare Costs
How to advocate and protect yourself.
Healthcare costs are out of control. Here’s how you can fight back.
With the vast majority of US healthcare providers as profit-driven businesses, the “care” in healthcare can seem virtually non-existent. But, you do still have rights, especially financial rights, though you’ll need to advocate for yourself.
While it can seem like the healthcare marketplace is a mass of unfeeling, convoluted, overpriced, blood-sucking enterprises, there are some ways you can make the best of it. This post will focus on a couple of opportunities to protect yourself financially.
Shop Around
First, it’s important to know you CAN shop the price of procedures🔬, imaging 🩻, drugs💊, and other tests🩺. If you’re looking for a new doctor, you can even find out their billing rates and choose who you go to based on cost.
This may not be very relevant to you if you have a super platinum plan that covers everything.
However, if you have a co-insurance, where you pay 20% of every interaction, or if you’re on a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), where you’re responsible for all charges until the deductible is met, then keep reading.
There are a few websites (some require subscription) that allow you to search the costs of procedures and tests in your area. And all health systems are now required to publish their list of prices online along with the CPT code.
So, before you make an appointment, do a quick search at one of these sites:
That’ll give you a range of what you could pay and maybe even point you to the cheaper options.
Cash Pay
Another option, if you’re not likely to meet your deductible for the year, is to inquire about doing cash-pay and not using insurance. Oftentimes, this is about half the price of what you’d pay with insurance.
Here’s a quick video how this could go:
Invest your HSA
Did you know… You can invest your HSA funds!
If you’re healthy and rarely ever spend the money in your Health Savings Account (HSA), that money belongs to you year-after-year. Rather than just letting it sit in the account losing value to inflation, you can invest it.
Contact the provider for your HSA, such has HSA Bank, Health Equity, etc and tell them you want to unlock your account for investing. You may have to agree to certain stipulations, but then you should be on your way to investing those funds.
It can be beneficial to consolidate HSA accounts if you’ve had multiple, because that’ll provide you with more money to invest and spend on healthcare.
Once you turn 65 years old, all the money including investment growth of your HSA funds can be withdrawn for any reason and you’ll only pay income tax. Essentially, it acts like an IRA once you turn 65. I personally wish I’d taken advantage of HDHP + HSA more often and earlier in my career, so I’d have more tax-free money to invest.
For more ways to protect yourself financially when dealing with healthcare, check out this post.
