What is a better healthcare plan, HMO or PPO?
r3searchteam asked:
Location: CA
Age: 24
Non-smoker and healthy
Location: CA
Age: 24
Non-smoker and healthy
Any recommendation for a healthcare plan that is not too expensive? I’m a college student with low income and don’t know much about the administrative side of health care. Can anyone fill me in on their experience?
Thanks a lot!
December 4th, 2008 at 9:43 am
As a young healthy individual I think an HMO is the better option to minimize the costs of co-pays and out of pocket. Make sure you find a PCP that you trust and like because that doc will determine nearly ALL medical care for you in an HMO. They determine if you can go see a specialist…HMO’s dont allow you to see a specialist (except dermatology) without a prescription from your PCP. In a PPO the costs are a bit more than HMO if you stay in network, but you have the option to go out of network if you want to pay more.
December 5th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Before the congress revamped medicare my HMO was pretty good except they didn’t provide wheelchairs, crutches, walkers, or the such! So I think a regular health plan is better than a HMO Now they had cut several of my benefits because I had medicare and had signed my medicare over to them! Now I don’t have them since in 2005 they doubled my premium from $162.00 to $324.00 so I dropped them since I was already getting most of my meds from the Veterans Hospital and they were free there since I had a disability from the Veterans Administration! I was told by other people not on Medicare that all of their copays went up from $5.00 to $15.00 per visit! So they lost a lot of people but some people had no choice, they had to stay with them! They were Kaiser Permanente HMO