Health Insurance and Open Enrollment

There are things you don’t know about the health insurance.

Why would you want to go through the open enrollment process again when the marketplace will automatically renew your plan? If you enrolled for health insurance through the marketplace in 2014 and auto renewed into the same plan for 2015 you could be missing out on a chance to save on premium dollars. All three health insurance carriers offering plans through the Marketplace in South Dakota either offered new, less expensive plans or they reduced their rates for 2015. For example, Avera introduced their Preferred Plan and Sanford brought forth their True plans. Both of these plans are offered in a limited number of counties, but if you do live in one of those, you could be saving premium dollars right now.

If you’re like a lot of other people your first experience purchasing health insurance through the exchange was for the plan year 2014. That means you probably actually enrolled in November or December of 2013, two years ago. Again, that was two years ago, Healthcare.gov’s website shows open enrollment beginning November 1st, 2015 and ending January 31st 2015 but there’s plenty to do between now and then. Healthcare.gov announces open enrollment dates  Along with finding your username and password you should dig out that insurance card and find out what plan you signed up for way back when. Once you know you can log into your account and know which plan you currently have, be prepared to update your personal information and begin looking at how often you used your health insurance during the past two years. You will want to make special note if you’re planning on using your health insurance in 2016 for any planned large health care expenses such as a surgery. This way we can compare the the savings in premiums against the saving in out of pocket expenses when choosing a health insurance plan.