Can a ‘Short Term’ Health Plan be a sufficient safety net if you choose to pay for regular medical costs OOP?
I posted here a couple days ago. To quickly summarize:
Got a job offer for ~25% higher salary, but their single insurance option is incompatible with my family's current situation. This means taking their insurance would cost me most of the additional money I'd be earning in medical expenses.
They've offered to give me $5k to forgo their insurance option.
If I choose to do that, I would also save $650 in monthly premiums
If I paid my family's regular medical needs (Doctor visits, prescriptions) in cash, It'd be an average of $650/month (likely less since I could use things like GoodRX and shop around for cheapest pharmacies).
That would leave ~$330/month in extra income for skipping insurance. (Actually quite a bit more because it'd be going into an HSA apparently not).
Because this decision would mean I don't actually have health insurance, if something terrible happened (Cancer, major accident, major surgery, etc..), I'd be screwed trying to find treatment without a way to pay crazy medical bills.
That's where the Short Term Plans would come in. I'm looking at plan like this:
What are your thoughts on pursuing this? Is there something I'm missing about the short-term plans, where they wouldn't cover me in the event of one of those terrible diagnosis? It looks like they don't cover pre-existing conditions, but again, I wouldn't be using it for any of my current, regular medical expenses. Also, would pairing it with a Gap policy make sense?
Thanks for your insight and expertise!
Edit: I assume I would definitely want a Short Term plan that covers prescriptions (which isn't many of them), since part of a catastrophic diagnosis is the crazy costs of medicine (cancer meds, for example).
submitted by /u/sicclee
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