Inflation is the highest it’s been in decades and two thirds of Americans are saying high prices are causing them to make difficult choices at home. The cure for inflation is of course raising the interest rates, and that’s going to make budgets even tighter and uncertain going forward.

So it’s only natural to look closer to home to see where your family can cut back on any non-essential spending. One area that’s an easy target is the way you approach your health benefits. This is especially true if your family is generally healthy like most of us.  A lot of people will try to reduce their premiums or cut off health benefits entirely. Believe it or not, some people actually put off getting diagnosed medical care due to the high high cost. They wait till something bad happens, and they hit the insurance deductible and then schedule the procedure they needed to get done. But that’s what happens when you have health insurance.

It’s pretty easy to look at those expensive health insurance premiums each month and think it’s a waste of money. When you add the copays, deductible, high out of pocket maximum, its pretty easy justify just keeping that cash in the bank instead.  But then reducing or cutting off your health insurance could leave you on deep in debt when the next serious medical event happens.  And, while delaying medical care may offer some short term spending relief, the downside is that those untreated symptoms turn critical, surgical, or worse. All resulting in even more urgent and expensive treatment just by kicking the can down the road and not getting the right care early in the diagnosis. But what if you could actually reduce your spending on catastrophic health benefits while keeping your family healthy and sheltered from the devastation of large unexpected medical bills.

#1: Look at low cost, high-quality medical cost sharing solutions. 

This one is a no-brainer. Medical Cost Sharing works for individuals, families, and businesses looking to save on the cost of health benefits. On a monthly basis, the cost to be a medical cost sharing member averages somewhere around 30-60% less than a typical health insurance premium.

In addition to that, medical cost sharing members have something called an Initial Unsharable Amount or IUA. This number represents the amount of money that an individual member must put forward towards their health care incident before the medical cost sharing will kick in and bills can be shared with their community. The options for this number vary by cost sharing community but I’ve seen them as low as about $1000 per need or incident and of course they can be higher as well and this will bring down the monthly contribution amount. Much like with a traditional health insurance option – a member would pay more each month for a low deductible than they would with a higher deductible. 

All of this points to why Medical Cost Sharing is a great option for people who want to reduce their monthly spending, but still want peace of mind when it comes to catastrophic health events.

#2: Direct Primary Care 

Paying for a monthly membership to a Direct Primary Care clinic could save you money on your healthcare costs in the long run. These Direct Primary Care or DPC medical practices use a membership model instead of the transaction based fee for service approach to health care. By charging a simple monthly fee, members get no cost yet unlimited access to their care team for all the routine needs people have.

Because these practices limit the number of patients they take on at a time, your appointments are never rushed and you have plenty of time to discuss all of your healthcare concerns fully with your care team – not like in the crammed 5 minute appointments people are used to. Many DPC practices utilize resources that allow them to connect with specialists – doctor to doctor about your conditions. For many people, this allows them to greatly reduce, if not eliminate, their need to see their outside specialists since they are able to manage their conditions with the full collaborative support of their personal physician.

Another way Direct Primary Care can save patients money is through lab work, imaging, and in office procedures. A pillar of many DPC practices is that they not only treat the patient but they look out for your spending on healthcare as well. Every Direct Primary Care practice will structure their membership differently but generally speaking they offer many in-office procedures such as minor suturing, EKGs, sports physicals, flu tests, and more for no additional charge. When it comes to things such as lab work and imaging, DPC practices typically pass on their discounted pricing to members or have relationships with local facilities who offer these services at a low cost. A Direct Primary Care practice might pass on their cost for a full lab panel to a member at a rate of $30-40 for the test, but if you had that same test billed to your insurance and hadn’t met your deductible yet, you could easily find yourself paying $350-400 for that same lab work.

#3: Be open minded

This may seem like a cliché but it’s actually super important.  After all its 2022 and lots of rapid fire changes are happening all around us. And in so many areas of life people are really quick to embrace convenient innovations and easy new ways of doing things in our everyday lives, but when it comes to our health and healthcare, many of us are totally stuck in the deep rut known as old school thinking, and that makes us slow to accept new innovations and and clinging to the old ways of doing things.

Think about it, at some point in the last few years you ignored everything you were ever taught as a kid and hopped into a stranger’s car for your first Uber rideshare. Or maybe you rented somebody else’s house while you were on vacation instead of staying at a hotel all thanks to AirBnB. These same transformative innovations are happening in healthcare and health benefits too. New ideas that make it easier and more convenient access to care while saving money in the process.

Medical Cost Sharing and Direct Primary Care are just two examples, but there’s plenty more just like them. Medical innovations such as virtual primary care, expert second opinions, home based testing and even on demand access to virtual specialized health care are changing the way people interact with the healthcare system.  Convenient and affordable prescription programs, and virtual mental health and counseling services – are all transformative examples of new ideas injected into the DNA of how we all interact, engage and consume healthcare.

You’ve probably even heard of the names – Good RX, Lemonaid Health, MeMD and 2nd.MD, Green Imaging, Walk In Labs, and Better Help. These are just a few of the pioneers that are bringing change to healthcare, simplifying how we go about accessing it, and bringing down the cost. So with all of that, I really want to encourage you to keep an open mind when it comes to your health choices and consider checking out some of the newest innovations that the health benefits world has come up with. They are every bit as exciting and user friendly as Uber and Go Fund Me. You might just be pleasantly surprised that the same kind of innovation that’s making your life easier in other ways is doing the same thing in healthcare and health benefits.