Benefits Enrollment Season (and my love for Kaiser)
It’s that fun time of the year again when you see how your benefits will change and how much your premiums will go up — because you know they will, they do every single year.
I plan on staying with the same health, dental, and vision plans that I had this year because of how satisfied I was overall with the plans. And that’s definitely saying something. I hated my PPO from the year before (they wanted me to pay $200 for routine/yearly blood tests!! Heck no was I doing that again!).
I have to admit that I love Kaiser and this love affair started a year ago. Right now, all I need to pay is the $15 copay for all office visits, x-rays, examinations, lab work, immunizations, etc… and the $10 copay for generic prescription drugs. To me, that’s heaven. No more costs that are based on a wacked out percentage of some sky-high drug or procedure price. No more pushing brand-name drugs on me when generic is available — actually Kaiser persuades you to use generic to keep costs down. No more fighting with insurance companies to pay for routine health examinations. No more lies from doctors about how a certain thing is covered and have it bite me in the @$$ a few months down the road when I get payment due because they “uh… just found out” that it isn’t covered by my insurance company; rather Kaiser knows exactly what is covered and isn’t covered so no surprises there. No more having to run from the doctor to the lab to the x-ray to the pharmacy all across town because Kaiser has it all in one facility. Kaiser focuses on prevention rather than cure and I think that is much more healthy and cheaper for me in the long run.
Differences between the Biweekly Numbers for 2009 and 2010:
- Health (Kaiser High Option) – $51.15 to $52.84 – increase of $1.69
- Dental (High Option) – $17.49 to $18.06 – increase of $0.57
- Vision (High Option) – $5.39 to $5.81 – increase of $0.42
Total: Increase by $2.68/biweekly (or $69.68/year)
To put this into perspective, in 2009 I am paying $74.03 biweekly (or $1,924.78 yearly) and in 2010 I will be paying $76.71 biweekly (or $1,994.46 yearly). Thus, benefit premium costs have increased by 3.62% from 2009 to 2010. Overall this seems to be pretty good, costs have not gone up wildly in the span of one year, but one can argue that I might be paying too much to begin with (~$2k is not chump change).
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