NJ Insurance Plans - Mike Sheeran, CFP

New Jersey Health Insurance - Reviews and Recommendations

Best Disability Insurance Companies

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Pick from the best disability insurance companies to protect your income. After being asked pretty often which disability insurance is the best, I decided to put this list together. These are my opinions what companies are the best based on what I’ve read and experienced.

While you are at it, don’t forget to read my recent post: Do you really need disability insurance?

Mike’s List of Best Disability Insurance Companies

In no particular order. These are for personally owned policies. Group coverage has quite a few more options as well.

To me, being the best means, which policy has the greatest likelihood of paying out a claim should you become disabled. Price is important but don’t waste your money on a policy that won’t be there when you need it.

  • MetLife – White Collar
  • Union Central/Ameritas – White Collar and Grey Collar
  • Guardian – White Collar
  • Standard – White/Grey Collar
  • Mutual of Omaha – for Grey Collar
  • Assurity – for Blue Collar
  • Mass Mutual

Get a Disability Insurance Quote

 

If you want to read more on disability insurance or the best companies, please contact me directly or check out the professionals at Disability Forums. These guys are really helpful for both consumers and professionals.

Medicare Who Pays First: Know the Rules Before Wasting Money

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Understanding if your Medicare coverage is primary or your other coverage is primary is important to making sure your claims are paid correctly and also possibly saving you money.

Medicare Who Pays First

Each situation is different so you should check out the guide here.

Medicare Guide to Who Pays First

Why bother checking on this? Let me show you a few examples.

  1. You work for a company with over 20 employees and you are over age 65.  In this case, your group coverage is primary over Medicare and you can delay enrolling in Part B benefits. This will save you around $100 per month.
  2. You are entitled to Medicare, retired and also have COBRA. Your old group plan was probably primary before but now that you are on COBRA, Medicare is primary. If you had delayed your Part B enrollment, now you need to enroll so that your physician services will be covered. In this case, forgetting to enroll in Part B could cost you a lot of money in unpaid claims.
  3. You are entitled to Medicare and still working for a group of under 20 employees.  In this case, your Medicare coverage is primary and you may be entitled to a discount on your group health insurance. If so, make sure you are being billed correctly. This could be a difference of a few hundred dollars a month. Also, you may have the option of coming off the group plan and purchasing a NJ Medicare Supplement Plan.

These are just three examples where it would have been best to know the rules prior to having any claims and also to save you a considerable amount of money.

Don’t forget to check the Medicare Guid to Who Pays First when you are entitled to Medicare!

Supplemental Life Insurance. Should you buy it?

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Supplemental Life Insurance is usually offered as an extra employee benefit option at large companies.  It is a life insurance benefit that can be bought through a payroll deduction for a low cost and usually with no or few medical questions. Sounds good but is it worth it?

 

Do you need supplemental life insurance?

Before you buy supplemental life insurance, you should really take a good look if you need life insurance at all.

People who do not need insurance may be those without any dependents, any debt or anyone depending on them financially. Ask yourself “if I were to pass away, would anyone be affected financially?” If that answer is no, then you should probably not be buying supplemental life insurance or any insurance at all.

 

How much supplemental life insurance should you buy?

If you have determined that you do need insurance, you can use this calculator to see how much you should consider buying.

Life Insurance Calculator from LifeHappens.org

Life Insurance is meant to cover a financial shortfall and they generally are used to pay for:

  • College Funding – if you have kids
  • Pay off Mortgage
  • Final Expenses
  • Pay off outstanding loans like credit cards or other loans
  • Make up for lost income for surviving spouse.
  • Pay estate taxes for large estates
  • Money to be left in trust for beneficiaries.

 

Where should you buy your life insurance?

You’ve determined you need insurance and now you know how much so the next step is to get quotes and buy it.

The supplemental life insurance option through your employer will be an easy option because it can usually be paid for through payroll deduction and you have the ease of signing up without medical questions. The downside to this is that you may qualify for a better rate if you were to apply on your own.

Key Things to Consider When Deciding Between Supplemental Life and an Individual Policy

  • If you need x amount of coverage, can you purchase that much through the supplemental life program?
  • Is the supplemental life coverage portable? Can you take it with you if you leave the company? And for how much money?
  • Are you in good health or bad health? Good health may benefit by buying individually but unhealthy people may get a better deal through the supplemental life program.
  • How long do you need the coverage?
  • Supplemental Life Coverage can be discontinued at the discretion of your employer. Are you ok with that or would you prefer to have control over your own policy?

 

 

Supplemental Life Insurance can be a great choice to buy a little bit of life insurance coverage for those that need it, but it’s not always the best option.

You can get a life insurance quote here on the ING website or request one directly from me. It’s always a good idea to get an individual quote so you can compare it to your supplemental life options.

I’d love to earn your business. Please contact me for a personalized life insurance quote and I will help you evaluate all of your options.

 

Additional Reading – What you need to know about life insurance – From LifeHappens.org

 

New Jersey Health Insurance Exchange

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Tonight the NJ Senate passed the NJ State Health Insurance Exchange Bill. The news is exciting for many New Jerseyans as it shows some promise for lower premiums in the future. The NJ Health Insurance Exchange bill will create an online marketplace for individuals and businesses to review all of their options in one place. In addition to making it easier to purchase insurance, the goal is bring down the prices for insurance in NJ. This would be fantastic as I have personally seen many companies rates that have doubled or tripled in the past five years.

Now before we all get googley eyed over the new bill, I have some concerns over how much the exchange can actually help our high NJ Health Insurance premiums woes.

New Jersey Health Insurance Exchange – Concerns

  1. What does affordable health insurance mean? In my opinion, this really needs to be answered with real numbers and not just saying “it’s more affordable”. If they an bring an HMO monthly premium from $600/month for a single down to $400/month, that would be quite a feat. At $400 a month though, is it affordable enough for people to buy? Maybe yes, maybe no?
  2. How do they expect to to bring down price levels to affordable levels?
  3. When merging the individual market with the small group, how much can we anticipate rates to go down?
  4. Just because we can purchase online, (we can already do this) why is it now magically less per month? And how much less?
  5. Competition is great and this should also help bring premiums down. But, how much??? There will be more companies trying to get their rates down with aggressive contracts with their physician networks and also by spending their money more efficiently. Should we expect smaller networks, more troubles getting services approved? How much less can we pay the doctors before they just give up and quit?
  6. Many small businesses rely on brokers to lend a helping hand with managing their plan. Will brokers be playing a major part in the exchange? If not, businesses must be trained and prepared to handle NJ Continuation, COBRA, claims, quoting, compliance, adds, changes, terminations of employees etc… Brokers act as an additional human resources department for many of the smaller businesses without a large office staff.
  7. New Jersey Protect was recently added to the NJ portfolio and it’s goal was to provide more affordable coverage. How many people have we actually enrolled in this program? My guess is not many. I give people premium rates for these plans almost every day and the response is always the same, “too much money”.  NJ Protect is considerably less in premium per month than the standard individual plans.

It may seem that I have a bad feeling about the exchange, but really my concern is with how much premiums are going to be. Are we just adding one more program that nobody can afford? New Jersey has a very large uninsured pool despite that fact that we have NJ Family Care, Medicaid, Medicare, individual health, NJ Protect, small group health, large group health, NJ Continuation, COBRA, DU31, Dep-26 and I’m sure there are even more programs. Basically, if you have the money, you can have insurance.

What I do like about the exchange is that it will certainly make it easier to understand the different programs and options. A singular place to look for insurance will be very helpful especially with the different eligibility requirements for each of the plans.

If you have an opinion on the New Jersey Insurance Exchange or think my ideas are completely wrong or misguided, I would love to hear about it.