Auto Insurance quotes

One other ways people can save a lot of money is their automobile insurance.I'll tell you six inside tips on how you can save money on your own car insurance

My first tip is to raise your deductible-
these are the amount which you pay out of pocket before the insurance company pays anything.For example, raising your deductibles from one hundred dollars to $500 will reduce your premium by 10% to 20% .And raising it to one thousand dollars will reduce 25% to 30%.It may pay to absorb the cost a fender benders yourself.

My second tip is to drop your collision and comprehensive coverage if you have an older car-
If your car is not worth, much why pay a premium for repairs on a vehicle you will probably replace if it's badly damaged

My third tip is to comparison shop-
Do not assume that all insurance companies charge the same rates.You can save from 30 percent to 50 percent just by comparing costs.You can get free quotes online
from insurance companies and independent agents which are people who represents several insurance companies.

My fourth tip is to drive safely :-):-) -
Accidents can greatly increase in premiums or the insurance company can cancel your policy at your next renewal.Also avoid traffic tickets since these can increase your premiums for up to three years.

My fifth tip is to have a good credit score-
To lower your rate,insurance companies may use your scored to judge your risk and adjust your rate accordingly.And so it pays to borrow wisely and consistently repay your debts on time.

My sixth tip is why not shop for insurance before you shop for your next new or used cars.Sports cars and more expensive cars are going to cost you more in premiums.Cars that are expensive to repair or that are favorite targets for thieves have much higher insurance costs .

There are other discounts such as being at least 25 years old,taking a driver training  course, carpooling,paying six month premium instead of monthly,installing anti-theft devices,low mileage driving,insuring more than one car and ensuring your home with the same company.

Make sure your insurance company is giving you these discounts.Shop around again in a couple years because rates are always changing.I hope these tips help you to lower your auto insurance costs.

Cheers......!!!!

Why Are US Healthcare Costs So High...??

I want to talk today about why healthcare costs in the United States are so phenomenally, fascinatingly expensive(That's with or without an insurance), but first I have to blow your mind:
Alright, so you've probably heard that the reason that people enjoy "free" healthcare in Australia and the UK and Canada, etc, etc is that they pay higher taxes. That money then goes into a big pot and is used to pay for people's healthcare, but in fact, in the US, we spend more tax money per capita on healthcare than Germany, Australia, the UK,or Canada.

That's right you pay more in taxes for healthcare than you would if you were British,and in exchange for those taxes, you get no healthcare.In fact, only about 28% of Americans get their health insurance through government funded programs, mostly poor people, old people, and Congress people. But private healthcare spending (most Americans are privately insured through their employers) is WAY higher than anywhere else in the world.In total, the US currently spends about 18% of its gross domestic product on healthcare costs.Australia by comparison? 9%.
Why is this? Well because everything costs more, which seems obvious, but apparently isn't, because every article you read is like "Oh it's because of malpractice insurance" or "it's because we're obese" or we go to the doctor too much or people are prescribed too many medications.

Well, not really.It's because everything costs more. A hip replacement in Belgium costs $13,000. In the US it's often over $100,000. Colonoscopies average over $1100 a piece in the US; in Switzerland they're $655. And on average a month of the drug Lipitor will cost you $124 if you live in the US. If you live in New Zealand? $7.Now we are also—not to brag—richer than all of these countries, so it makes sense that we should spend a little more on healthcare. But we don't spend a little more. We spend a ton more. And vitally, we don't get anything for that money, which means we are essentially
paying people to dig holes and then fill those holes back up. Like we don't live longer—in fact we're 33rd in life expectancy—and in everything from asthma to cancer, according to one recent nonpartisan study, American healthcare outcomes are "not notably superior."So why are we spending all of this money for nothing?

Well first, let's discuss some of the problems that are not actually problems.For instance, the problem is not so-called "overutilization:" the idea that Americans go to the doctor more and get more tests and spend more time in hospitals. We know this because Americans actually go to the doctor less than Europeans and spend much less time in hospitals, although to be fair, you can stay in a Dutch hospital for seven nights for what it costs to stay in an American hospital for one night, so no wonder we're hesitant.Also it is not because we're sicker than other people. Everyone likes to blame obesity on our rising healthcare costs, but yeah, no. That argument is just not supported by data.For one thing, disease prevalence does not affect healthcare costs that much. And for another thing, while we do have more obesity in the United States, which sometimes leads to health problems, we have fewer smokers and less alcohol consumption (really? Apparently yes). So that saves us a little money, and if you compare us to like the British or the French, in the end it's probably a wash. The truth, as usual, is complex. Like, there are obvious inefficiencies in our healthcare system. For instance, not everyone has insurance. If you don't have insurance, you still get healthcare, but you're responsible for paying for that healthcare, which often you can't do, so you end up going bankrupt. That sucks for you, obviously, because you're bankrupt,but it also sucks for the rest of us because we have to pay not only for your care, but also for all the money the hospital spent trying to get you to pay for your care. Also
the only options available to uninsured people are usually the most expensive options, like emergency rooms, which is just BANANAS. But those inefficiencies are hard to measure. Fortunately,there are things we can measure.So like I said before, because the US is one of the richest countries in the world, youwould expect us to pay a little more for healthcare than most people. The question is, when dowe pay MORE than you would expect us to pay, and that turns out to be pretty interesting.

Let's start with malpractice and so-called "defensive medicine." The idea here is that doctors are scared of huge malpractice suits so they order a lot of unnecessary tests in order to, like, cover their butts. That does contribute to our healthcare costs, like there are more MRI and CT scans in the US than anywhere else. However, there are a bunch of states like Texas that have passed tort reform to limit malpractice suits, and in those states healthcare costs have dropped by an average of a whopping 0.1%. The biggest estimates for the total costs of defensive medicine put it at around 55 billion dollars, which is a lot of money, but only 2% of our total healthcare costs. Another smallish factor: doctors (and to a lesser extent, nurses) are paid more in the US than they are in other countries, and by my possibly-faulty math we end up spending about 75 billion dollars more than you would expect us to there.And then we have the cost of insurance and administration costs, like paperwork and marketing and negotiating prices. That's about 90 billion dollars more than you would expect us to spend. We spend about $100 billion more than you would expect on drugs, not so much because
we take MORE of them, but because the ones we take cost more per pill.

Okay, and now for the big one. I'm gonna lump inpatient and outpatient care together, because
in the US we do a lot of things as outpatient procedures, like gallbladder surgeries, that
are often inpatient procedures in other hospitals. We're just gonna make a big ball.
That big ball is $500 billion more than what you would expect given the size of our economy.
Per year.

Why? Because in the United States we do not negotiate as aggressively as other countries do with
healthcare providers and drug manufacturers and medical device makers. So like in the UK the government goes out to all the people who make artificial hips and says "One of you is going to get to make a crapton of fake hips for everybody who is covered by the NHS here in the United Kingdom. But you better make sure your hips are safe, and you better make sure that they are cheap, because otherwise we're going to give our business to a different company." And then all the fake hip companies are motivated to offer really low prices because it's a really huge contract. Like think if your company got to put hips inside of everyone in England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland (I guess not everyone.Just the people who need hips).
But in the US we don't have any of that centralized negotiation, so we don't have as much leverage.
The only big exception is Medicare, the government-funded healthcare for old people, which, not coincidentally, always gets the lowest prices.So basically,in the United States, providers charge whatever they think they can get away with, and they can get away with a lot, because it's really difficult to put a price on, like, not dying. This is a phenomenon called "inelastic demand," like if you tell me that this drug will save my life costs $7 a month, I will pay you $7 a month for it. If you tell me that it costs $124 a month, I will find a way to find $124 a month to pay for it. You can't negotiate effectively on your own behalf for healthcare services because you NEED them. And not like you need a Macbook Air or the new season of Sherlock, but actual, physical need (I guess it is like the new season of Sherlock).So basically, until and unless we can negotiate as effectively with the people providing healthcare as Australians and British people do, US healthcare costs will continue to rise
faster than anywhere else in the world and we WON'T get better healthcare outcomes. I am so
tired of people offering up simple explanations for what's wrong with our healthcare system.They say "Oh, it's malpractice," or "it's doctors who must also be businesspeople" or it's insurance companies or "it's insane rules for who can GET insurance." It's drug companies, it's government bureaucracy, it's an inability to negotiate prices.

Yes, yes,yes, yes, and YES! It is all of those things and more! It is not a simple problem, there
will not be a simple solution, but it is probably the biggest single drag on the American economy
and it's vital that we grapple with it meaningfully instead of just treating healthcare costs as political theatre.

So I hope I've at least introduced the complexity of the problem.Welcome back to the United States. As you can see, everything is peachy here.Friendly reminder, educational blogs are allowed to be long. All of the people who are commenting about how punished I am, did not read to the end of the blog.I feel dizzy.

How does health insurance work and 5 important changes that occurred

How does health insurance work?? Imagine that you have a one hundred thousand dollar heart surgery,which is a covered medical expenses under your health insurance plan and let's say this health insurance plan has a one thousand dollar annual deductible,20 percent coinsurance after deductible, a two thousand dollar out-of-pocket limit and a two million dollar annual limit on your health insurance coverage. We will explain how these different components of a health insurance policy work.

Before we begin it's important to note that any health insurance policy purchased after September 23rd 2010 will not have a lifetime maximum limit on most to the plan benefits and any health insurance policy purchased after january first 2014 will not have an annual limit on most plan benefits.The first thing we'll talk about is a deductible.

what is a deductible?? typically a deductible is the amount of money you must pay each year before your health insurance plan starts to pay for covered medical expenses.So with a one hundred thousand dollar heart surgery bill you are responsible for paying the first one thousand dollars ,after this one thousand dollar deductible is met the insurance company will pay percentage of the bill and you will pay the coinsurance.Let's talk about coinsurance.

what is coinsurance??typically coinsurance is a cost-sharing requirements where you are responsible for paying a certain percentage and the insurance company will pay the remaining percentage of the covered medical expenses after your deductible is met.For health insurance plan,20 percent coinsurance once deductible is met the insurance company will pay eighty percent of the covered expenses while you pay the remaining 20 percent until your out-of-pocket limit reached for the year.

what is in an out-of-pocket limit ??typically the out-of-pocket limit is a maximum amount you will pay out of your own pocket for covered medical expenses in a given year.for a plan with a two thousand dollar out-of-pocket limit, you will pay a one thousand dollar deductible and one thousand dollar coinsurance while the insurance company covers the remaining ninety eigh thousand dollars of the heart surgery bill .Even if you're hospitalized again in the same year,the insurance company will pay 100 percent of the covered expenses until you reach your annual coverage limits.

What is an annual coverage limit?? some health insurance plans place dollar limits upon the claims and insurance company will pay over the course of a plan year.so if you bought an insurance policy with an effective date of July 2011, your plan year would run from July 2011 until June 2012.If you have an annual coverage limit of two million dollars and you have medical bills that cost more than two million dollars during your plan year, you would be responsible for paying those bills out of your
own pocket.Once your new plan year begins in July 2012 ,your deductible ,coinsurance, out-of-pocket limit and annual coverage limits would all reset and insurance company would once again begin to pay your covered claims .Beginning September 23rd 2010,the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act health care reform begins to phase out annual dollar limits.Starting on September 23rd 2012,annual limits on health insurance plans must be at least a two million dollars.
By 2014 ,no new health insurance plan will be permitted to have an annual dollar limits on most covered benefits.Some health insurance plans purchased before March 23rd 2010, have what is called grandfather status .Health insurance plans with grandfathered status are exempted from several changes required by health care reform including this phase out annual limit on health coverage .Here's one more concept you should be familiar with.Some health insurance plans offer co-payments

what is the co-payment?? typically a co-payment or copay is a specific flat fee you pay for each medical service .Such as thirty dollars for an office visit .After the thirty dollar copay, the insurance company pays remainder of the covered medical charges ,sometime subject to the deductible and coinsurance .Certain recommended preventive services, immunizations and screenings are covered with no cost-sharing co-payment on health insurance plans purchased after March 23rd 2010 .let's say
you're not feeling well and went to see your doctor who charges two hundred dollars for the office visit.If your insurance plan has an office visit co-payment of thirty dollars then you will only be responsible for the thirty dollars and the insurance company will cover the remaining one hundred and seventy dollars.But if you purchased your health insurance policy after March 23rd 2010 and you're due for routine preventive care screening like a mammogram or a colonoscopy
you may be able to receive that screen without making a co-payment.You can talk to your insurer or your license e-health insurance agent if you need help determining whether or not you qualify for screening without a copay.

There are five important changes that occurred with individual and family health insurance policies on September 23rd 2010.
Those changes are

1.added protection from rate increases
insurance companies will need to publicly disclose any rate increases and provide justification before raising your monthly premiums.

2.added protection from having insurance canceled
an insurance company cannot cancel your policy except in cases of intentional misrepresentations or fraud

3.coverage for preventive care
certain recommended preventive services, immunizations and screenings will be covered with no cost-sharing requirements

4.no lifetime maximums on health coverage
no lifetime limits on the dollar value those health benefits deemed to be essential by the Department of Health and Human Services

5.no pre-existing condition exclusions for children if you have children
under the age of 19 with pre-existing medical conditions ,their application for health insurance cannot be declined due to pre-existing.In some states a child may need to wait for the states open enrollment period before the application can be approved.