Today, I got a letter in the mail that came from Blue of California. Right now, I have absolutely no health insurance coverage whatsoever. Could it be possible that the price of a health insurance plan that is printed in this letter is truly going to be that low for me? I decided to investigate.
It is wise to be especially suspicious of anything that an insurance company decided to mail to your home. This is particularly true if you are not currently a customer for that particular insurance company. In those cases, it means that the letter they sent you is actually nothing more than an advertisement. One should never automatically believe what one is told by a business that is interested in having you hand your money over to them.
At first glance, it appeared that this letter from Blue of California had good news for me. A quick scan of the letter made me question my initial impression, however. Blue of California is another name for Blue Shield of California. That is the insurance company that was in the news because it was paying its CEO an incredibly high amount of money. It is the same insurance company that wanted to raise its rates by 59% not too long ago. Do I really want to get health insurance from a company with this kind of a track record? It is always a good idea to learn about the insurance company that you are considering making a purchase from. Do you like how they treat their customers?
The letter said “We offer a variety of plans and benefits starting at just $73.” This is in bold, and obviously meant to catch my attention. I just might be able to afford a premium that was only $73.00. Unfortunately, there was an asterisk located at the end of that sentence.
Scanning further down the page, in extremely tiny print, was what the asterisk indicated. It said “*$73 monthly Vital Shield 2900 rate for individuals ages 19 to 29 and in good health”. I am currently 38 years old, and my husband is 35.
This tells me that I cannot trust that the bold statement that Blue of California used in this letter to get my attention is something they will actually do for me. Always read the fine print. It is a good way to uncover when an insurance company is playing around with the truth about how much their plans will actually cost.
Next, I went to their website to use their online quote generator. I put in my age, and my husband’s age, and our zip code. This tells me that Blue of California never had any intention in charging me the $73.00 insurance premium that they put in bold print in the letter they sent me, (despite what they tried to make it look like).
The prices of their health insurance plans, to cover both me and my husband, start at $224.00, and go up from there. Dental and vision coverage is not included in any of these plans, and neither is maternity coverage. If I run the quote calculator for just myself, the cost of premiums start at $100.00, and then increase. Again, this won’t cover dental, vision, or maternity. Oh, and I forgot to mention that all of these plans come with a deductible that I would have to pay for out of pocket before Blue of California actually covered any of my health care.
Image by Tim Morgan on Flickr