Follow healthy habits.
Managing Costs of Chronic Conditions
Summary
If you’ve been diagnosed with a chronic condition, this article will give you some guidelines to help manage your care and costs. In it you will learn how you can get help to:
Look for a Health Plan That Covers Your Needs
What health plan is best if you need a lot of medical services and medications? It may not be the one with the lowest premium. Premiums are the regular payments (often monthly) that you make to keep your coverage.
Plans with low premiums often have high deductibles. That means you need to spend a lot of money before your plan starts paying its share of the costs. You might also have higher co-pays when you visit the doctor or seek other services. If you visit the doctor often, those co-pays can add up.
You may be better off paying a higher premium each month to get a lower deductible, and spend less on doctors’ visits, tests, and medications.
Your Action Plan: Managing the Costs of Your Chronic Condition
To keep the costs of your chronic condition under control:
- Follow healthy habits, including taking your medications as prescribed.
- Make a budget of your yearly costs, and how you plan to pay for them.
- Look for a health plan that pays a bigger share of the deductibles and co-pays, even if the premium is higher than other plans.
- Consider a flexible spending plan, which lets you set aside pretax money from your paycheck to pay for healthcare.
- Ask your providers, such as pharmacists and doctors, how you can stay healthy while saving money.
- Try to use providers in your plan’s network. Use resources like our cost lookup to estimate how much out-of-network care might cost.