In 2013, Cigna Health Insurance enabled you to sign up for their non-Obamacare plans and avoid having to sign up for a Health Care Reform health insurance plan until 2015. This was a great strategy to keep your health insurance costs lower in 2014. Unfortunately, we are nearing the end of 2014, and your Cigna health insurance plan is ending December 31. Here’s the best alternative health plans to replace your Cigna coverage.
Where do you go to get answers? How do you make the decision? Which is the right plan for you?
The answer to those questions are based on three specific things.
The first one is, are you subsidy qualified based on your adjusted gross income? If so, then we want to apply on Covered California. That’s going to reduce a few of the insurance company choices you have, but free money in the way of subsidies is hard to pass up. So we’ll go that route.
The second question is, do you have doctors that you want to maintain a relationship with? If so, we need to search those doctors first and figure out which networks they participate with before picking an insurance plan. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to pick a plan your doctor does not take.
The third question is, do you take prescription medications? If so, are they generic or are they brand name, and how many prescriptions m are there? If everything you take is a generic prescription, it might make sense to be in a Bronze Health Care Reform Plan because the retail cost of those generic prescriptions may be low enough to offset the cost difference between Silver and Bronze. If it’s only $20 for your generic medications and the price difference is $80 between Bronze and Silver, then it makes more sense to stay with that Bronze plan.
Given the answers above as the starting point, the mapping is going to work like this:
- if you have one of the Health Savings Plans, the HSA-compatible plans that Cigna offered, there’s really not a good mapping for you. There’s two options inside of the new Obamacare plans, and that’s basically a $4,500 deductible, and in some cases there’s a $6,000 deductible at the Bronze level. For Assurant and Cigna, they have one Silver HSA-compatible plan, and it’s typically at a little bit lower deductible level, $2,500 and $3,500. So that’s what your mapping looks like.
- For those of you who are in the Managed Choice Open Access Value plans – those are plans that gave you unlimited office visits for a co-payment, but then only provided generic coverage for a co-payment; they did have brand coverage, but it had a $3,000 brand deductible, so I viewed the plans as generic only.
Those Value plans really don’t map into the new Affordable Care Act plans. They are closest in benefits to the Silver plans, which give you unlimited office visits, and cover generic prescriptions with a co-payment. But the Silver plan has a $2,000 deductible, and a lot of people in the Value plans from Cigna were in the higher deductible plans, the $5,000 and the $3,500. So it’s not a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s closest to the Cigna plans. If you didn’t use the medication or the prescription part of it, you might actually fit in the Bronze plans if you don’t need a lot of office visits.
- The last type of plan that Cigna offered was the Managed Choice Open Access plans. They basically gave you unlimited office visits, generic and brand prescription covered for just co-payments, and they do map very well to the new Silver plans.
To see what the Cigna replacement plan options are, run a California health insurance quote for yourself, and use this mapping to select your plan.
Hopefully that will help you in terms of making the choices. If you’d like some help picking the plan that’s specific to what you need, then give us a call. We’ll be happy to help you with that.
This is Tim Thompson with SPF Insurance. Protect the health of your wealth by protecting your wealth of health. Bye now.