There are a couple of easy and simple ways to manage your health care costs. Number one is to see if you qualify for a subsidy, which you can do by using our subsidy estimator on our website, as well as going to the marketplace and seeing if you qualify for a subsidy and how much of a subsidy you may qualify for.

Another thing would be using urgent care whenever possible as opposed to the emergency room. It’ll do a couple of things for you. Number one, urgent care is going to be a lower copay. And the urgent care center is probably going to be able to process you a lot faster, meaning that they’re going to get you in and out of there much quicker than the emergency room is. So not only is it going to save you money, but it’s going to save you time.

The other thing you always want to mindful of is using doctors in your network. Whenever you use a doctor out of network, you’re going to have higher costs. So it’s important whenever possible, go to a doctor in network as well as hospitals that are in network as well.

One of the things that all plans are going to be covering is preventive services, something that we’ve already covered in our individual policies. But it’ll be expanded with the health care reform and what we’re covering with the preventive services.

The ten essential benefits include ambulatory care, emergency services, hospitalization, laboratory services, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder, prescriptions, rehabilitation services and devices, preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management and pediatric services.

So you’ll be looking at things like yearly physicals, yearly checkup at the OB/GYN, pap smears, mammograms, prostate exams, colonoscopies, well child exams, child immunizations, immunizations for adults as well. So services you can do for yourself to make sure that you maintain your health and you keep on top of your health care, not letting things get out of hand.