Do You Understand Your Healthcare?

Thank you to United Healthcare for making this post possible and for helping me be better prepared to make responsible healthcare decisions.

This last year has probably been the toughest year medically speaking that our family has ever had. In the past we’ve been a generally healthy family, but evidently this last year was our year for everything to happen and if I’m going to be entirely honest, I wasn’t prepared. By prepared I mean I didn’t know the in’s and out’s of our medical insurance like I should have. Since we’d never really had any major medical issues, I just knew that our primary care and preventative visits were covered other than our $25 co-pay, and that was all I needed to know.

Then my daughter had a run-in with the cubbies at daycare and several stitches later I received a bill that I wasn’t really prepared for. Evidently our deductibles and hospital co-pays were something I should have known more about and I wouldn’t have been so blind sided.

A photo posted by Alison Freisz-Steward (@jewell5022) on May 19, 2015 at 7:57pm PDT

Then what do you know a few months later my son broke his arm. Another ER visit and another hospital bill.

To top it all off, hubby and I both have some back issues and both have had to resort to various injections to try and manage the varying levels of pain. Let me tell you, those aren’t cheap either and while insurance covers a lot, it doesn’t cover all of it and understanding my coverage better before all of this being done would have allowed me to make better decisions on how to approach the issues, and possibly saved some money or been able to save some beforehand, but at the very least I would have been confident that whatever type of care I sought out for each issue was the most appropriate for the individual situations.

A Healthcare Challenge

My challenge to you is to understand not only your coverage, but also the best place to go for certain types of healthcare because there are options out there beside your Primary Care doctor or the local emergency room.

Once you’ve had a chance to review the information be sure to enter the “We Dare You to Share” challenges on the United Healthcare website.  There are three dares for the month of June:

1. Play a concentration game by matching the “Where to go for Health Care” terms to their definitions (be sure to study the infographic above).

2. Watch the new UHC commercial about their Health4Me app and answer a poll question.

3. Take the quiz about using your medical benefits.