"Medical hacking" for lower costs?
I’m new to the USA, moved to Texas (I know that makes a difference between states). I’m going to be self employed, and hopefully I will not qualify for lower income marketplace benefits.
I was pretty shocked by the prices of healthcare plans, even the so called “HDHP” plans, I couldn’t find anything lower than ~$300/mo – mind you I’m a healthy late 20s male with no prior conditions or prescriptions.
My main concerns are big health issues that might come up that would be very hard to pay myself, let’s say $25k+.
I got an idea from a heath broker that said that I could potentially just pay for Ancillary (or supplemntal) coverages. Specifically Accidents and Critical Illness.
This sounded amazing! Maxing those out would cost around $20-50 each and would cover the main things I’m worried about. Plus, there are no deductables in most cases and some plans can give you back upwards of $100k. I tried reading the fine print, and it also seemed very reasonable in most cases.
I thought about paring those with somekind of DTC/Teleheath for my mundane checks (dental / basic teleheath questions) for around $5-15 a month (like Amazon clilnic).
This seems to me like a potential trend of “medical hacking” (trying to pay less by combining plans and converags together). But the main question I have is, what am I missing? Compared to $300-500/mo this ~$100/mo deal seems a bit too good to be true.
I’d love to hear from you and see if I’m missing anything.