What Else Do I Need to Know About the Kentucky Child Health Insurance Plan?
Many children are provided with health insurance by their parents or through their parents’ employer, but many times that health insurance is less than perfect. Child health insurance often does not cover the types of things that children need most, and if you have only partial insurance coverage, you may want to get assistance from the state of Kentucky to help you supplement that coverage so that your child does not go without. Unfortunately, you can’t get KCHIP if your kid is already insured, no matter how sparely. What you can do is apply for Medicaid.
If you choose to cancel your insurance policy and get KCHIP, then your child may have to wait six months before they can receive child health insurance coverage through this state insurance plan. This will never be the case for families who make little enough to qualify for KCHIP and not be required to pay a premium. However, if you are trying to insure a previously covered infant and your income is at least 186% of the federal poverty level, then you will have to wait six months. The same applies to any child up to the age of eighteen whose family makes at least 156% of the federal poverty level. If you lost your insurance in circumstances that you could not take charge of, you can get this waiting period waived.
There are children who may have been previously insured but who do not need to wait, nor pay a premium, in order to receive KCHIP. They are able to be insured as soon as they are approved, regardless of how they came to be uninsured. These children include those between the ages of one and five whose parents make at least 134% of the federal poverty level, and at least 150%; and kids between six and eighteen whose parents make at least 101% and at most 150%.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.
Can I afford a high deductible for teen health insurance?
In a previous post, I mentioned putting together a spreadsheet to compare health insurance quotes. If you’re shopping for teen health insurance, this step is even more crucial to saving money.
If you need teen health insurance for healthy kids, then you are usually weighing the cost of monthly premiums against just the cost of paying for routine exams, colds, and infections yourself. Plug the expenses you can anticipate into the spreadsheet and see what the cost differences are between a high deductible policy with lower premiums and a lower deductible policy.
Then there are the situations that parents can’t anticipate–like car accidents and sports injuries–and those that can be anticipated–such as medical risks for an obese teen or one with chronic health issues. These are the circumstances that families really need to be insured against, and why you need to really do your due diligence while researching teen health insurance.
Once you get into more costly scenarios for your spreadsheet, you’ll quickly discover that the higher the deductible, the lower the overall cost of carrying the insurance. My family chose a policy that has a whopping $4,000 deductible, but we save almost that much each year just in premiums, and this policy pays 100 percent after $5,000 out of pocket. We pay more for everyday colds and routine exams, but if someone in our family needs surgery, we literally save thousands and thousands of dollars.