Health Insurance
Looking for health insurance, as we are retiring early. I am 59 and my wife is 58, both in good health. Need something that would cover us in any state with all the traveling. Right now we are livi...
Forum Discussion
First, check out what your entitlements might be with COBRA.
My experience with pre-medicare insurance at age 60+ was that it was very expensive to pay the whole premium myself, and very difficult to find the coverage I wanted, i.e. no network or geographic restrictions, including emergency care outside the U.S. The best deal I could get was using COBRA to continue on my employer's "Traditional" plan, which had 80% coverage with very high deductibles and out of pockets, for about $3000 a month to cover two of us. We still had to buy trip insurance when we traveled outside the U.S. Even that had a network, going to 50-50 for out of network services.
You can lower the cost, or get more of the medical costs covered, going to PPO or HMO plans, but you may find your coverage geographically limited. There are states where you can find carriers with U.S. wide PPO networks, others where it is hard to get any coverage out of state.
Where you are, trying to pick a domicile, and 5-7 years from Medicare, I would consider the cost, availability, network coverage, and geographic coverage, of medical insurance as my top priorty for establishing a domicile. It is a lot more important than saving a few hundred, or even a few thousand dollars a year on income or sales taxes and vehicle registtration.
At this stage of your life, medical insurance may be the biggest expense in your budget (for us, 6X the mortgage, so you need to do a lot of shopping. We can't begun to suggest carriers without knowing where, yet the where is probably the biggest issue with what you will find available today,
FWIW, while I was paying $3000 a month premiums, when. DW got cancer we were $15k to $30k out of pocket each year for what the insurance didn't pay, and what they did pay was about $800k during the last three years of her life.If you are lucky, nobody gets sick and all you pay will be premiums. If somebody needs medical care, it is going to be a lot more tham insurance.
My experience with pre-medicare insurance at age 60+ was that it was very expensive to pay the whole premium myself, and very difficult to find the coverage I wanted, i.e. no network or geographic restrictions, including emergency care outside the U.S. The best deal I could get was using COBRA to continue on my employer's "Traditional" plan, which had 80% coverage with very high deductibles and out of pockets, for about $3000 a month to cover two of us. We still had to buy trip insurance when we traveled outside the U.S. Even that had a network, going to 50-50 for out of network services.
You can lower the cost, or get more of the medical costs covered, going to PPO or HMO plans, but you may find your coverage geographically limited. There are states where you can find carriers with U.S. wide PPO networks, others where it is hard to get any coverage out of state.
Where you are, trying to pick a domicile, and 5-7 years from Medicare, I would consider the cost, availability, network coverage, and geographic coverage, of medical insurance as my top priorty for establishing a domicile. It is a lot more important than saving a few hundred, or even a few thousand dollars a year on income or sales taxes and vehicle registtration.
At this stage of your life, medical insurance may be the biggest expense in your budget (for us, 6X the mortgage, so you need to do a lot of shopping. We can't begun to suggest carriers without knowing where, yet the where is probably the biggest issue with what you will find available today,
FWIW, while I was paying $3000 a month premiums, when. DW got cancer we were $15k to $30k out of pocket each year for what the insurance didn't pay, and what they did pay was about $800k during the last three years of her life.If you are lucky, nobody gets sick and all you pay will be premiums. If somebody needs medical care, it is going to be a lot more tham insurance.
