New Websites Help You Plan Healthcare Costs
January 18, 2018
Planning healthcare costs can seem complicated. Now, FAIR Health offers two free websites that can help you plan such costs and understand how health insurance works. One is for New Yorkers, the other for people nationwide.
YouCanPlanForThis.org is a new site designed for New York State residents with support from the New York State Health Foundation. We launched it on September 12. At the same time, we launched a new, enhanced version of our original, award-winning, national consumer site, fairhealthconsumer.org. The new version provides many features of the New York-based site for people across the country.
Cost Lookup Tool
Both sites have an easy-to-use tool to estimate your medical or dental expenses for particular procedures. The tool takes into account your geographic area and whether you’re insured or uninsured. It asks if you’re staying in your health plan’s network or going out of network. A network is the group of providers (such as doctors and hospitals) that have agreed to accept your insurer’s contracted rate as payment.
A new feature, available on both sites, can help you budget for healthcare expenses if you’re paying a deductible. A deductible is the amount you have to pay for medical expenses before your insurer will start paying. If you’re paying a deductible, when you see an in-network doctor, you’ll have to pay the full in-network rate. The tool can give you an estimate of what that in-network procedure will cost.
If you’re uninsured or are going to an out-of-network doctor, the tool also can help. It will give you an estimate of what the out-of-network procedure will cost (usually more than the in-network price). You can use that information to plan for that expense. Is the doctor charging more than the estimate? Then, you can use the estimate to talk to your doctor about the cost. Perhaps you can negotiate a better price.
Episodes of Care
Some procedures or conditions are more complex than others. A 15-minute office visit for a doctor to check your sore throat is simple enough. But, procedures like cataract surgery or conditions like diabetes involve multiple procedures, known as an episode of care. For example, cataract surgery involves doctor visits, lab tests, anesthesia, radiology and other costs besides the surgery itself. In another feature new to both sites, YouCanPlanForThis.org and fairhealthconsumer.org let you estimate the total and itemized costs of 25 common episodes. You also can watch an explanatory video for each of the episodes.
Educational Resources
Our national site always had articles on insurance basics, to help consumers understand topics like cost sharing and to provide tips about choosing a health plan. In both YouCanPlanForThis.org and the enhanced fairhealthconsumer.org, that library of articles has been expanded. New topics include negotiating costs, women’s healthcare coverage and help for caregivers.
Both sites also provide a glossary of healthcare and health insurance terms. They offer links to external resources, such as healthcare provider directories and organizations for people with disabilities and specific conditions. In addition, the sites offer a new FH® Healthcare Quality Toolkit to help you learn about resources that relate to the quality of providers.
Just for New Yorkers
Because YouCanPlanForThis.org is especially for New York State, it offers some features specific to that state. For 100 frequently performed procedures, YouCanPlanForThis.org gives you information about certain New York providers’ education, hospital affiliations and prices, among other items. In February 2018, FAIR Health will launch the second phase of YouCanPlanForThis.org. That will bring quality measures and pricing information for common outpatient procedures in hospitals in four geographic regions in New York.
If you live in New York, YouCanPlanForThis.org will help you plan costs and navigate the healthcare system with confidence. Wherever you live in the United States, fairhealthconsumer.org will do the same.