photo credit: wilhei55

Open enrollment season is approaching, and soon employees will be able to investigate their healthcare cover options for 2009. With that in mind, here are a few tips for keeping your costs down in the coming year.

Don’t Ignore your Options

Many people ignore the fact—or just aren’t aware—that they have the option to choose their healthcare plan. If you didn’t know, or you haven’t bothered in the past to check out your options, make this year the one that you break the habit. If you have options, it’s never a good idea to ignore them—you could end up saving money simply by choosing a new plan.

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photo credit: r3v || cls

Picture this: You visit your doctor and find out that you have a chronic and potentially serious illness for which you will need medication. With half a dozen different medications which might be appropriate, which should your doctor choose? What if there is no way of knowing in advance which will work best in your case?

That’s an important decision for a doctor, simply because choosing the wrong medication can have negative consequences for patients. Currently, however, the new field of pharmacogenomics – genomics-based medicine – is revolutionizing the way doctors prescribe medicine, leading to an entirely new type of highly personalized healthcare.

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photo credit: Marcin Wichary

Recent proposals about buying health insurance across state lines have sent many of us scrambling to check policies, and wondering whether such changes might mean it’s time to find a new insurer. After all, wouldn’t such a change open up the market and make it possible to get cheaper coverage?

Unfortunately, it’s by no means certain that such a change would be largely beneficial. In fact, it’s actually possible that the end result might be more expensive insurance overall, and that over time, more Americans would find health insurance too expensive.

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photo credit: stuartpilbrow

Recently the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust reported that health insurance premiums increased in cost more slowly this year compared to increases over the last ten years.

Is this good news, or just more bad news with a thin candy-coated shell? Unfortunately it’s tending more towards the latter case.

The Kaiser Family Foundation report indicated that the average premium went up by around five percent over 2008, contrary to recent trends in which health insurance costs have risen at a pace more rapid than that of both wages and inflation.

The flip is that even though the rate of premium hikes has slowed down a little, people are actually getting less coverage for their money.

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Healthcare and the issue of “entitlement” programs such as Medicare will likely become hot topics as the Presidential election looms closer but, really, this is relevant no matter where your political affiliations lie.

Medicare and Social Security aren’t subjected to the same budgetary processes as most other facets of government spending, and this may in the future force upon us something of a healthcare crisis.

However, it’s not what you might be thinking. This isn’t about the baby boomers expecting the younger generation to pay for Medicare via their tax dollars. Healthcare spending will indeed become a problem since the federal government is set to sink an estimated $54 trillion into senior healthcare over the next 75 years – which may make a $700 billion bailout look like pocket change – but it’s not necessarily due to the aging population.

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