By Jan Greene
Just came out of a session at Health 2.0 about websites that help consumers with their medical bills and health insurance. Here are the highlights:
Change:healthcare is my current favorite among these types of sites. It addresses the same issue as this blog talks about: The yawning gap between what consumers are now expected to know about managing their healthcare dollars and their practical ability to do so. It has detailed information about medical bills and is regularly adding tips on how to handle specific difficult situations, such as negotiating with a provider before you get a medical service.
Another one, bwell-informed, is useful for choosing the right health insurance plan for you. There are a number of websites that allow you to buy health insurance online, but this one has a nifty tool that will let you compare plans and predict your out-of-pocket costs given your typical use of healthcare services.
Getinsured.com is another website that helps people buy health insurance. The interesting thing about this was the company CEO’s comments about the difficulty of many of his customers to afford health insurance. He thinks the marketplace will in the next year or two offer many more low-cost catastrophic insurance plans for people who can’t afford $200 or more to insure themselves and their families. He also noted that some of these kinds of products, such as discount cards, being marketed today aren’t worth the money. This is a problem we’ll address here soon.
Medicaresaver is a handy site for people looking for Medicare Part D insurance, which can be a bewildering search because of the complexity of prescription drug plan choices for the elderly and others who use Medicare.
More later!