Different health and dental plans

With all the fuss going on about how to reform health care insurance, perhaps it's time to look at different ways in which the market already caters for different methods. For example, there's no need to get a traditional medical plan: there's also no need to have a traditional dental plan.

We tend to think that there's only three ways of dealing with the need for some sort of health insurance: either the government does it all for us, we get full insurance coverage through our work or we just have to pay for each and every treatment as we get it. But this really isn't true.

There's a very different way of having a health plan. A discount plan.
Here's how it works. If you click through the links there you'll see the details but simply: they've got hundreds of thousands of customers. This gives them buying power. So providers of medical and dental services want the business of those hundreds of thousands and are willing to offer special prices. This isn't insurance: this is access to discount price medical care.

For routine work, this is probably even better than insurance: you might end up paying less than the traditional copay for example. If you add on to this a catastrophic health care insurance plan (say, an annual deductible of $10,000, just as an example) this might well give you better health insurance than either the government or a job could give you.

Well worth checking out, at least.