Understanding different types of health insurance plans

Several insurance policies aiming to support our health are floating in the US insurance market…..and, these plans have been categorized into different types & classes. This typification of the plans have been done on basis of their separate features, their plan details, the coverage they are offering, etc. In order to choose the best plan from them for you, which offers all or most of the facilities you expect, a thorough understanding of all these health insurance types is damn necessary. And yes, proper screening & understanding of all of them is indeed a complicated process. Selection of the best one, depends upon the comparative study between different offers & facilities of different health plans….to find out which one meets most of your requirements. And this decision isn't at all easy. You are not getting your “dream” or “idol” insurance plan from any firm. Whether it is variety of services covered, cost, or access to your preferred doctors of your choice, you probably will not get everything perfectly in that plan you are finally focusing to.

I am sharing some details regarding the types of group health insurance policies here…may be these can boost your knowledge about these, which can help you to understand your options.

What is Managed Care?
Whatever the plan outline is, one concept is very essentially associated with any kind of health plans in USA…..in fact, the concept has a specific term. It is called: "managed care" Yaa, may be you know this, coz its quite talked about in here. This concept is used for reducing the expense of the Insurance company on the insurance plan…by affecting the total quantity of health care you are using. This program is associated with almost all insurance plans. Actually, it’s a means to cut down on the costs of insurers.


There are several health insurance plans. They mainly fall under the following 3 categories:

Fee-for-Service Plans:
This is the traditional, old health care programs type. All the conventional kinds of health insurance policies come under this type.

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs):
All those Health maintenance organizations are also available insurance plans for people. The HMOs actually happen to be prepaid health policies.

Point-of-Service Plans (POS):
There are several Health maintenance organizations, who now offer people an indemnity-type insurance option. These types of health plans are normally knows as Point-of-Service Plans…generally called as POS plan.

Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs):
Preferred provider organization are another type of insurance organizations, who offer health plans. Generally, the insurance plans offered by them come as a combination of “conventional fee-for-service” and an “HMO”. In short these combined plans are called PPOs