Oh, My Goodness! It’s October, and that means that it is open enrollment time for insurance again. If you are like me, you have spent hours and hours reading the different benefit options, until it feels like your eyes are bleeding. My husband and I even went to a financial advisor in an effort to help us determine what the best options would be for our health insurance coverage. By the time we walked out of his office, my head was spinning like Linda Blair in The Exorcist! All those terms still meant nothing to me. PPO, HMO, Preferred Provider Network, Deductible, Co-Pay, Co-Insurance, Out of Network, and on and on and on!
Then we went home and studied some more. We looked online. We read the brochures again and again. I don’t know how anyone can figure out what the best options are without taking time to study like it’s for a final or a term paper.
I know that with our auto insurance, we just used the same company to cover our vehicles year after year, without ever checking into rates elsewhere. I just did not want to spend that time calling around. However, last year I decided to call around, and wound up saving over $600 a year for our coverage! It is the same with health insurance. Just because a company was your best bet financially in years past, doesn’t mean that it will be this year. Your circumstances may have changed, or the company’s benefits and rates may have changed. It is definitely worth the effort to check on what your company and another one has to offer.
Americans are terrible at taking time to understand their enrollment options for their health insurance. We typically spend more time planning a family vacation or a new computer purchase than we do shopping for or reading about our health insurance benefits. Because of this, four out of ten American workers waste an average of $750 each year due to mistakes on their insurance benefit. Amazing!
Aflac Incorporated is a Fortune 500 company providing individual and group voluntary insurance products that help deliver protection to more than 50 million people worldwide. They have been providing policyholders with the freedom to focus on recovery, not financial stress, for nearly sixty years. Aflac offers voluntary insurance policies, which are supplements to major medical plans, and pay policyholders directly for costs associated with a covered serious injury, illness or other loss. The cash benefits can be used for any purpose, such as rent, gas, groceries, child car, or any other expenses you may have in a difficult time.
Some of the different kinds of policies that Aflac offers include accident, dental, life, vision and more. In the United States, Aflac has been #1 in worksite/voluntary sales for 13 consecutive years. They have a presence in all 50 states, and in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
For more information about open enrollment, see the Aflac WorkForces Report website.
I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.
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