Overview of health insurance
View Instant Florida Health Insurance Quotes
First of all if you are shopping for Florida individual and family health insurance you came to the right place. Florida medical insurance and Florida health quotes can all be obtained from our website. East Coast Health Insurance is of course located in South Florida, in the city of Deerfield Beach which is just outside of Fort Lauderdale.
Our Promise to You
We offer both individual and family health Insurance quotes from every major Florida health insurance company and because we started in Florida, no one knows the market better then us, and this includes our expansive database of Florida Government Health Assistance plans for those that don’t qualify for individual health coverage. I personally researched that article for several hours, and spent even longer updating our Florida County Health Plan database which consists of free plans offered by all Florida counties. I also have an extensive list of Florida Free Public Clinics for those that are between health plans and need to see a doctor but can’t pay for it. There are more resources available here so please explore our Florida Public Assistance section.
If you are wondering why I spent so much time on this, it is because I believe that all Floridians (everyone really) has a right to medical care whether they can pay for it or not, whether you are suffering from an uninsurable condition, or are just between jobs. We have also spent a considerable amount of time educating our agents in the various government health plans available to the needy, so please call our trained Florida agents anytime to help you answer your questions, from where is the local Medicaid office to which Pubic Health Plan would be best for a child. We do this at no charge and if one of our agents is not helpful or doesn’t offer you the kind of attention that I am promising, please call back (888 803 5917) and ask to speak to Jeremy or Caroline Ehrenthal and we will personally address all of your concerns. We promise to help you no matter what you need, and you will never pay us a dime.
We are the only brokerage that researches every free government and public assistance program whether you live in downtown Miami or a trailer park in Sarasota, and we promise to get you to the nearest free clinic, County Health Plan, or social security office to apply for Florida Medicaid or SSI benefits on our very important Florida health insurance resource page.
Florida’s Health Insurance Companies and Our Florida Health Quote Engine
Our quote engine can currently display quotes from Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Vista Health Plan, United, and Vista Health Plan, we should have Avmed in South Florida up by February of 2010. Our individual pages on Avmed and Blue Cross will show these companies so that you can use our website for all your Florida health insurance quote needs.
Before you get started we want you to know that we strive to answer every question on this website, and are not just a quote engine. If you look around you will find nearly 100 pages on Florida health insurance including our law section and education sections. We have a page or more on every Florida health insurance company and are constantly updating and answering new questions for this site. If you think we are missing something we encourage you to mention on our contact/feedback page and we will add it right away.
East Coast Health Insurance Will Get You Covered in Florida!
East Coast Health Insurance also encourages South Florida resident to visit our Miami Dade Blue section as we believe this plan might help change Florida’s awful health insurance numbers (we rank near the bottom for the uninsured as a percentage of our population) and we remind you that nearly 40% of Floridians qualify for free government health assistance and don’t even know it, so please visit our Florida Government Health Programs section.
Miami Dade Blue
Our recently added and subtracted and then added again section on Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida is the main website for all Miami health insurance information including the new Miami Dade Blue Health Quote page. If you live in Miami-Dade this seems to be our most popular health insurance plan right now, we hope you support this plan as it is supposed to be moving North (sort of like the swine flu!) so if you live in Palm Beach or Orlando by the end of the year you should have some affordable relief.
New Florida Health Insurance Plans
In 2009 Florida was introduced to new individual plans from Cigna, Avmed, and Coventry. All should be up on Florida Health Insurance quote page now.
Things to Be Careful of when Shopping for Health Insurance in Florida
Never buy a discount plan unless its AAA and includes three car tows a year. These are not necessary and will sometimes hurt you more then help you as they might impede us from getting you a social program through the county, state, or federal government. If you are about to buy a discount plan, unless it is to be paired with an actual health insurance policy with a high deductible (AND EVEN AT THAT POINT YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED) you should pick the phone and call us at 888-803-5917.
The other policies to watch out for specifically would be anything from Health Markets such as Mega, Midwest, and United American. If you have bought one of these policies or any policy not from a carrier that I am about to mention, you should walk or run over to your files and pull out the policy right now.
Aetna, Avmed, United Health One, Humana, Cigna, Vista , Coventry, Blue Cross.
This is the list of all the carriers that we currently deal with. If you have any other carriers, you should look at your policy and look at the first page and make sure that your deductible added to your coinsurance or co-pays which equals your maximum out of pocket is at least defined. Many companies will sell you a policy with no defined maximum out of pocket, I could name these carriers but suffice it to say that you should always have a defined moop (maximum out of pocket). Secondly, you should have one annual deductible, not one per incident. And lastly and also very important, there should be no caps on anything except your lifetime maximum which should be at least 1 million but is usually 3-5 million.
For more information about Florida Health Insurance Quotes visit our Individual and Florida Family Health Quote Page
Different Florida Health Insurance Plans
We also have written extensively about the Florida health insurance choices from PPO’s, POS plans, HMO’s and EPO plans (though Humana is no longer an EPO so there are no more EPO’s in Florida. Currently however there are four PPO plans including Humana, United, Cigna (I thought this was a POS but found out differently), Coventry, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. The POS plans are Avmed and Aetna two of my personal favorite carriers to work with in terms of the company and the broker support they offer and of course customer service. The HMO plans are Medica (a new entrant to the field) and the established and the excellent top rated and affordable Florida health insurance plan Vista Health Plan. These are the only eight Florida Health Insurance companies that you should ever get comparison health quotes for.
However there are other health insurance companies such as Avalon (they are the only acceptable plan on this list and ECHealthInsurance.com), Freedom Life or Time or whatever name they currently go by, and Assurant you can certainly get quotes for these plans but I advise against them as they have inherent costs that make them unacceptable when compared to the other Florida health insurance companies that we offer. Their commissions to brokers are extremely high as well as their cost structure. In other words it is not their fault but the barriers to entrance in Florida health insurance are too high for upstarts.
Their cost structure is not comparable and thus they end up having their benefits suffer to look competitive with the name brand companies. This is how they all inevitably end up. Avalon is a great company for instance and I like personally everyone associated with it but I won’t sell it until they can compete. They had excellent health quotes in Palm Beach for awhile but inevitably they had to wallop the county as their costs got too high. A similar thing happened to Aetna but for a different reason. Aetna whose heart is in the right place certainly tried to give coverage to high risk people. I personally wrote hundreds of cases with them and their costs skyrocketed and they had to hit everyone with a huge 20% increase. Now as their books get cleaned up their costs came back down and they are now competitive again with everyone else. The lesson is stay away from these companies if possible.
Most Floridians are familiar with their health insurance perhaps from a company that once provided it or if they owned a company and purchased it for their employees. However, when it comes to understanding individual medical insurance in Florida you must abandon all your original thoughts and knowledge and be content to know that this is (unnecessarily in our opinion) challenging. Individual health insurance quotes in Florida are unusual and can be very confusing if you don’t keep it simple.
Therefore when shopping for individual health insurance the first thing to remember is that you most likely want what everyone wants when it comes to individual health insurance in Florida and that is the most for the least. On the left is a list of all of our individual carriers and a link to a quote from each of them. Above that is our “start my quote” button which gives you a quick comparison quote from most of them in one place. Unfortunately, at press time we couldn’t get them all in the same place yet, but we are working on it.
You want office visits with a straight-forward co-pay and no surprises to come in the mail in the form of bills for labs and prescriptions. You might be willing to make some sacrifices but you do want at least co-pays for these basics.
In our experience this is 90% of the market. The other 10% will be happy with catastrophic medical insurance. What most of you are talking about is a co-pay plan from a PPO such as the United Health Care/ Golden Rule Co-pay Select plans, the Aetna POS plans, the Cigna POS plans, the Blue Cross PPO plans (most of them they have tons of them), and a few others depending on where you live.
What are Your Specific Health Insurance Benefit Priorities?
But what separates most of our happy customers from the ones that pay their bills with a frown every month, are the ones who have the Florida health insurance plans from Blue Cross in the 90′s, the Vista Health plan, or the Coventry Florida PPO plans. What separates these medical insurance plans? It is in fact that they have co-pays for everything else besides just office visits and prescriptions. This plan type, specifically the Vista plan in my case, has saved me hundreds of dollars per year in medical costs; and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida PPO plans (90 series) would have done the same thing as would the Coventry plans.
I am not preaching that Florida Individual Insurance HMO’s here are the only health insurance plans to buy, but I will tell you that if you are willing to put up with certain things you will save money over the course of a year. For instance, if you tend to go to the emergency room or have diagnostic testing etc then these type of Florida health insurance plans are usually ideal. Of course the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida plans and Coventry Individual and family plans would also accomplish this, and depending on where you live and how big your family is, one of these medical plans would most likely be the solution to the least premium for the most health insurance in Florida.
On the other hand the new Cigna individual plans are the price leaders in Florida for the most part right now, but don’t’ have the health insurance benefits of the plans mentioned above.
Therefore, we must in future articles break down the health insurance companies by region and demographic and tell you who is the cheapest based on certain factors in various hypothetical situations. Unfortunately, these are not the only factors in buying health insurance if you are an individual or family in Florida.
In the meantime, we have been very active in the Florida health insurance market and blogging about Florida health insurance news on our popular health insurance blog. In the time of this blog it has become abundantly clear that individuals and families in the Florida health insurance market are postponing getting health insurance coverage in order to find out the results of the Washington power struggle.
I cannot say many things with as much certainty as I can this: Health Reform is going to help Health Insurance Companies not you. Yes you might be helped as an indirect effect of this plan but in the end the powers that be will not help our Florida residents anymore than they helped victims of Hurricane Katrina. I am not going to get political on this particular forum, as I am not even very political period. I am however economically certain that regardless of this power grab our economy is in a dire situation. If you can still afford a health insurance policy in Florida by all means get one. The Florida welfare rolls are expanding daily and our own local county health programs are operating at 150% capacity.
Jackson Health System in Miami is not able to help the residents of Miami to any where near the degree they did two years ago as there is no budget or means of collecting taxes to provide for you. If you must depend on the government for anything then of course we will assist you get health coverage in Florida, but if you can still afford basic health coverage I recommend you get it. I still have a Florida United Health Care policy.
If you are looking for the best and most affordable health insurance in Miami, Orange County including Orlando, Florida health insurance quotes, Jacksonville, Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Tampa, Sarasota, and any other city in Florida? Compare Florida Health Insurance plans side by side to find the most affordable Florida health insurance company.
Florida Health Insurance Policy Points
1. In Florida Health Insurance from Aetna, Avmed, Blue Cross, Cigna, Humana, and Vista are domiciled carriers. This means basically that they are bound by the laws of Florida for their policies.
2. Right now in much of Florida Cigna is the most affordable health insurance policy.
3. Right now Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida offers the most comprehensive and overall best health insurance policy
4. If you live in South Florida and cannot afford health insurance you might be able to qualify for one of the county health plans
5. Always consider Aetna if you have a family with more then 4 members. Aetna in Florida offers flat pricing so as you add more to the policy the cost per member comes down and it can easily go from the most expensive plan to the most affordable plan.
6. I am a fan of the HMO from Vista in South Florida. My wife has it and it offers the best first dollar health insurance coverage in Florida.
7. Humana is no longer the most affordable product in any demographic, though if you have pre-exisiting conditions I recommend you at least apply with them. Same for if you have already been rated up in Florida for health insurance.
8. If you are over 50 years old and/or take more than 1 medication I recommend you apply with multiple Florida health insurance companies.
9. Avmed is the price leader in Broward County and Fort Lauderdale. They also appear to be the most dependable and most caring health insurance company in the state. I recommend them highly in Broward county only!
10. Only buy health insurance from a broker that offers multiple health insurance companies. One that doesn’t is not acting in your best interest.
11. Call East Coast Health Insurance at 888 803 5917 for all your Florida health insurance needs.
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