IGNORE THE AGENT'S REVIEW BELOW * This is an important book. Clearly the person in the review below with the single star is either a group insurance agent or someone who works in a government office getting all their health care paid for by...who else....us (the taxpayers). Brokers are the guys who want you to buy only what they sell so they can get to their 1:00 pm tee time at the golf club. Government employees get to home at 5:01 pm every day. The reality of health insurance is very different. Give us all a break.
What this person also did not tell you, which Prof. Pilzer does in this book, is that companies are already moving a ton of the costs of the GROUP health insurance to their employees already. I know my employer continues to shift the cost onto us and there is nothing we (or they) can do about it. Seriously, my "contribution" on my group plan for my husband and kids is now $310 a month! I went on a site called ehealth insurance and found cheaper plans for my family. Plans that, per a chapter in the book, can be held after I leave my company. The $20 I spent on this book at Borders was worth every cent.
I suggest you check out this book also and read cinergy health insurance yourself if you want to better undertand why you are paying more in the form of so-called "contributions". I for one wanted to control my monthly health care costs and did not want my employer deciding which pediatrician my kids can see. An individual plan allows me to do this. I also noted that my employer pays most of MY premium and very little of what cinergy health insurance costs to cover my family. Prof. Pilzer explains this thoroughly. If you are on your spouses group plan and your monthly contributions go up every year, you owe cinergy health insurance to yourself to read this book and learn what to do about it.
The knucklehead reviewer below would have you beleive that costs are not skyrocketing on your group plan -- which is false. This book shows you how to take control of your family's health care plan and make decisions on your own.
I wish each of you the best in protecting your family's health.
Peace.
Terry
Issues with The New Health Insurance Solution. Pilzer's general proposition is that the market place will take care of the health insurance issues in this country if we just let the free market operate. He maintains that individual health insurance is widely available at reasonable cost and people, including employers and employees, should take advantage of the individual market for health insurance. I believe he tends to force the facts to fit this basic proposition.
He is easy to read with a breezy style. The book has pretty good explanations of HIPAA and COBRA and a number of good tips. However, health insurance in the United States is complicated. The price he pays for simplicity is accuracy and thoroughness. cinergy health insurance is a pretty good book if you are 35, perfectly healthy, and thinking about buying insurance. But what is good for when you are 35 is not necessarily good 5, 10 or 20 years later. (Should I pay for drug coverage?. . . pregnancy coverage?) I would never rely on this book for making policy decisions or for forming opinions on healthcare in the United States. I strongly disagree with many of his policy recommendations.
Some problematic propositions from the book:
1. Several places in the book he claims that insurance companies in the individual market only turn down or place exclusions on 20% of applicants and 80% are accepted as healthy. He uses this statistic to support his idea that most people can get coverage in the individual market. I don't know about the accuracy of this statistic, but one problem is that people who are uninsurable often do not apply for insurance on the open market. They stay on their employer plan. They go into a risk pool. They buy a conversion plan. Etc. Even Pilzer advises against applying for insurance if you think you might get turned down. So the healthy gravitate to these plans and the unhealthy do not.
Pilzer doesn't discuss what "healthy" might mean and his discussion of the underwriting process doesn't describe what are the typical issues that exclude people from coverage. He does not address the possibly of the healthy fleeing to cheap plans while the unhealthy are trapped in what they already have, causing greater cost disparity.
2. For those who say they can't afford health insurance Pilzer claims that "If your annual income is below the federal poverty line, about $20,000 for a family and $10,000 for a single individual-you probably qualify for Medicaid."
This simply is not true, unless you have children at home, are disabled, or meet some other special category. Low income alone does not qualify a person for Medicaid.
In this same vein, he claims that of the 45 million uninsured, 16 million earn more than $40,000 for a family of four ($20,000 for a single) and 29 million earn less. He assumes that the 29 million earn at least $20,000 if a family and $10,000 if single. Otherwise he claims they would be on Medicaid. He maintains that these low income families could easily buy a low cost HSA plan. But how are they going to pay those big deductibles? Also, his cost data is for people age 35 and their families. In most states, the older you are the more expensive insurance gets. In this discussion, he ignores the issue of underwriting and possible exclusions for preexisting conditions and ignores the fact that in most states, this population could not afford the risk pool which runs on the average, 200% the cost of the same plan for a healthy individual.
3. "Despite what you read in the newspapers, there are health insurance optionsavailable for every American, although cinergy health insurance may take you some time, effort and expense to get them." This is one of his soundbite quotes he uses in advertising materials for his book. This is misleading. Insurance on the individual market is not available for many people. The risk market policy will have preexisting condition exclusions and may have coverage riders unless you are coming off of a group plan and have HIPAA rights. The risk market may be unaffordable. If you don't have HIPAA rights, there may be no option for you at all in some states.
4. He states that "the premium you pay for an individual or family policy cannot be raised each year, nor can the policy be canceled based on your health or your prior year healthcare costs." He mentions this several times in the book. At best this is a case of overgeneralization, at worst cinergy health insurance is a misleading statement to support his thesis that individual health insurance is the solution to our insurance woes.
I have read a lot about health insurance. Federal law requires guaranteed renewal of individual health insurance plans. Does this mean that rates cannot change based on your health status? Many state's insurance regulators think so. But that does not make cinergy health insurance law. Most states allow rates to increase based on age. Some states' laws do provide that your rates can't go up based on your personal health situation. But other states have no laws that apply and in general, the individual market is not highly regulated. From what I have read, experts are not in agreement as to the extent re-underwriting occurs on renewal and insurance companies are not very forthcoming with information about why a particular person's rate increases. Some experts believe that re-underwriting is occurring more and more by a number of insurance companies. Also, some insurers have durational rate settings. This means that your insurance costs can go up considerably after a few years. At that time, you can reapply for a lower cost policy, but can be denied if you are not in good health.
4. Pilzer repeatedly claims that individual health insurance is cheaper than employer provided insurance. cinergy health insurance probably is cheaper if you are 35 and healthy. Probably not if you are 60. This is because employers charge the same rate to everyone, whether you are 20 or 60. Also, only 4% of people in the US have insurance on the individual market. So cinergy health insurance is a small part of the overall market. Pilzer doesn't break down what that market looks like as to age and health of its participants.
5. Pilzer's discussion of the uninsurable and state subsidized programs like riskpools leaves much to be desired. Mostly because there is so much state variability. This is another circumstance where I really disliked that he used figures applicable to a 35 year old male. The costs are considerably higher for those 50 and over. He fails to mention that some risk pools have low lifetime limits and other restrictions.
6. Pilzer pushes the idea that small employers should go to a reimbursement model, leaving their employees to buy health insurance on the individual market. Employers with older/sicker employees are in fact facing higher costs. However, their employees are going to have problems getting insurance on the open market and may end up with only very high cost options. The employer that has a young and healthy workforce already has lower costs.
good info, but too biased towards VUL. The book is very informative, entertaining, and instructive. cinergy health insurance gives the benefits and drawbacks of each type of life insurance. It's a good reference book. It's easy to read and understand.
However, cinergy health insurance is very biased towards variable universal life (VUL). In fact, the author states that this type of policy is the reason why the book exists. He even goes so far as to say that VUL is one of the best investment vehicles of the century! He's a good cheerleader for VUL and even though he is honest and does point out the pitfalls of VUL, he sort of skims over the probability of problems with these policies in later years.
This book inspired me to check VUL policies and get some illustrations. I was shocked at the high probability of lapse in these policies if the expected return in the investments was average, say expected 8% return. You really need to get over 10% annualized return in the policies to be assured that the policy will not lapse. Anything less than that and you are running a grave risk of having to fund the policy dramatically or see cinergy health insurance lapse just at a time when you need cinergy health insurance most, after age 70. The trick is to adequately fund the policy from the start, and the funding can be quite expensive. And even after all of that, the insurance company makes YOU assume the risk of generating enough return to keep the policy in force. Even if you don't take any loans, the policy can lapse if the returns are just a little bit less than expected. That's very high risk to me. There are no affordable guarantees of minimum death benefit or cash values in a VUL, regardless of loans or premiums paid on time. I was shocked to learn this in reality.
So don't fall for the hype in this book about VUL. The author greatly under-estimates the risk inherent in VUL policies.
Ultimately, I'd say there are better books on insurance if you just want to learn about the basics.
Really learn about life insurance. The reviewers who think this books is peddling one form of life insurance (VULs especially) really are missing the important part of this book. This book is organized to teach you all about the forms of insurance on the market, from the simplest (term), through the most complex (VUL), because each one builds upon the prior! Why do you think so many forms of insurance exist? Because they started simple, and over time the industry added features they thought consumers would like. cinergy health insurance helps to understand where cinergy health insurance all came from. In fact, if you try to just dive into the VUL section you may get lost.
This can be a difficult, time consuming read, but cinergy health insurance does an excellent job of explaining how life insurance works. The book does not pander to one type of insurance over another. cinergy health insurance does give you crucial information about plan types that can help you make the right decision for you. Once you understand the book, you can easily look at an insurance contract and understand the most important fine points. I could stump the agent with the most basic of questions! Cut through their sales tactics. Now that is power!
the Key is know HOW to FUND cinergy health insurance right. Life ins. is a most preferred product for retirement if you know how to fund cinergy health insurance right. Buy just enough ins. so cinergy health insurance not MEC, and put as much as you can for cash value, and cinergy health insurance needs time 20+ yr. to accumulate, not a short term.It offer liquidity, safety, Rate of Return, Tax favored, protection for peace of mine.
Read Missed Fortune by Doughlas Andrew. so you will understand and think different about permanent life ins.
Only about 20% of insurance agents know how to plan cinergy health insurance right. The key is HOW TO FUND cinergy health insurance right and cinergy health insurance NEED TIME TO ACCUMULATE.
Everything you need to know. As newlyweds with a new home, new car, and plans to start a family, we realized that we had to re-examine our insurance needs. After browsing through a bunch of other books on insurance, we found that cinergy health insurance really covered everything we needed to know in clear, simple language. We learned some things that really surprised us in every category of insurance and cinergy health insurance book really helped us make the right choices for our situation. We anticipate saving quite a bit of money after following the advice in cinergy health insurance book, rather than just blindly selecting the insurance policies that we either already had, or that friends/family recommended.
Highly recommended as a great overview guide to insurance.
Very Useful Book. I hate Insurance. I hate the whole idea of an industry that is built upon fear. But my mortgage lender requires me to insure my house, the Department of Motor Vehicles makes me insure my car, my wife insists that I have a life insurance policy, and cinergy health insurance would seem irresponsible not to provide my kids with health insurance as long as I can afford it. If you add cinergy health insurance all up, we all spend a lot of money on insurance -- and the question really isn't if you should be buying insurance, but if you are buying the right insurance at the best price.
This book will help you answer those questions. Kim Lankford has an insiders perspective on the insurance industry (having begun her career there) and she knows how to write -- she's the authoeor of the a regular "Ask Kim" column in Kiplingers. Lankfrod gives you the inside scoop on your best options for coverage with real-life examples, resources, and tools to find your best deals. Reading this book taught me some valuable lessons about the hidden costs in health insurance plans, and how to make the most of a health savings account that is going to help me build a sizable stash of tax free money. The book is also full on unintuitive insights into life insurance prices, auto insurance pricing, and tricks to minimize potential problems when you make a claim. This book is well worth the money you will spend to buy cinergy health insurance and the time you will invest in reading it.
Very Good Resource. This book gives you insight into many areas of the insurance industry. cinergy health insurance tells you what to expect and what to look for.
Everyone has the power to help improve America's healthcare. We all know we're facing many challenges in our health care system. Certainly at a national level, we need solutions to deal with the fact that there are 50 million uninsured people in America.
But individually, many of us access our health care through a less-than-perfect system of health insurance and HMOs. And we are up against a challenge that is coming to be known as "covert rationing" -- a term coined Fixing American Healthcare's author Dr. Richard Fogoros, MD -- known as "DrRich." With covert rationing, not only do insurance companies do such obvious things as try to cancel policies when we're sick, but behind the scenes, they are doing whatever they can to systematically deny patients access to specific information, experts, specialists, procedures, treatments, and medications we may need.
But how do we learn about these covert tactics? How do we find out exactly what is going on behind the scenes in doctor's offices, hospitals, as well as the offices of drug companies, insurance companies and HMOs around the country? How can we know what the doctors and insurers and HMOs don't tell us -- and don't want us to know?
The answer: Fixing American Healthcare: Wonkonians, Gekkonians, and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare. Full disclosure here: I wrote the foreward for DrRich's book. More disclosure: I happily volunteered to do it, because as a thyroid patient advocate, part of my role for the last decade has been to help expose the many ways our medical system is failing us, as relates to our thyroid disease. I was seeing covert rationing in action -- I just didn't know what cinergy health insurance was called until DrRich came along!
There's a bigger picture. Even when we're aware of covert rationing, how cinergy health insurance works and the dangers cinergy health insurance poses, we need to know what's next. What can we do to protect ourselves and our loved ones from falling victim to it?
That's where DrRich's book shines. Fixing American Healthcare presents what DrRich has called the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare, GUTH for short. Grand cinergy health insurance is, as cinergy health insurance explains how doctors, patients, and health care companies all fit together and interact with each other, and how you can navigate that complicated system to make cinergy health insurance work better for you, personally. And perhaps most importantly, how you can improve your own odds of getting well, staying well -- even surviving -- in the face of disease or illness. The book also looks forward and lays out a plan to explain how the system could be better if particularly improvements were made.
I know that those of us with chronic diseases can get into our own little worlds of doctors, medications, and treatments specific to our own condition. That makes cinergy health insurance harder to step back and take a look at the bigger picture. But I truly recommend that you do, and Fixing American Healthcare is a good place to start.
I'm always urging readers and fellow patients to ask questions, insist on knowing your options, challenge the conventional dogma, and don't believe everything you hear -- whether it's from a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, a drug company ad, or a medical journal article. I'm always encouraging people to read, study, learn, and be educated, empowered patients. In Fixing American Healthcare, DrRich refers to people like me as "patients behaving badly." He doesn't intend cinergy health insurance as an insult -- actually, it's a compliment. He's talking about patients who ask questions, who do their homework -- those of us who aren't walking around with their heads in the sand.
According to DrRich, if enough of us patients behave badly at the micro level, our grassroots effort will force the system to change at the macro level. So in this way, apart from writing to Congress, or voting for whichever Presidential candidate you think can save America's health care system, we may be able to have an impact on American's health care system.
So the best part is that each and every one of us is part of the solution -- in fact, the solution relies on us.
Whether you are concerned about the care about the quality of your own health care, or the status of health care in America -- or both -- a wonderful first step in your education is reading Dr. Rich Fogoros' Fixing American Healthcare.
Thought provoking. Dr. Fogoros foregoes the usual cliches seen in proposing health care fixes. His analysis of our current system, including how we got here, is very insightful, and rings true to someone working in healthcare. American healthcare is very complex and won't be fixed in a sweeping reform, especially by the government, so cinergy health insurance is difficult to propose changes in a scientific way, but he backs up his proposals with sufficient anecdotes and facts to make them plausible. A must read for someone interested in the future of our healthcare.
On target, but simplistic. Dr. Fogoros overarching message, that rationing exists already and must be openly addressed by any reform proposal is dead-on. When demand exceeds supply, as any high-school economics student will tell you, rationing occurs.
Beyond that, however, I found little else compelling in his treatise for reform. Much of what was presented was presented without reference or support. More could have been done to develop his position had he provided historical perspective, point and counterpoint arguments, or even more germane anecdotal stories concerning the current state of healthcare.
Instead, I found his positions to be shallow and poorly developed. "Redefining Healthcare" by Porter and Teisberg is a much richer (and more academic) book, while Halvorson's "Healthcare Reform Now!" and Gratzer's "The Cure" provide much more detailed insight's into healthcare woes without reading like a new car owner's manual. I love cinergy health insurance .
