What options are available to early retirees that must find their own health insurance?

Host: A lot of people would like to retire early, but most will have to find their own health insurance. What options are available to them?

Bob Hurley: It's great that you are in a position to retire early. Obviously, you are one of the fortunate folks that has prepared to be able to leave the workforce maybe or maybe even to change careers and go into something that you had a strong interest in doing all your life and now you finally, have the chance to do that. You have obviously planned; you have financially planned in order to set yourself up for this early retirement so the good news is you have some resources to help you as you move through this process of getting health insurance for yourself and for your spouse. So some of the things you want to think about is number one, start early, get that process started before you actually leave your employer so that you can understand what products available to you in your particular market or in the market that you are moving into and what the prices are going to be.

I would encourage you to considered raising the level of your deductible on your health insurance coverage for two reasons. One, you can lower monthly premium and therefore, lower that monthly outlay of cash for your health insurance premium and pull those cost down knowing that you have got resources available to you to cover that deductible. Let's say if you are considering $1,500 deductible or even $2,500 deductible, by going into those kinds of deductibles you can hold down your monthly premium. The second things that happens by buying a higher deductible plan is, in many cases if you are on some maintenance medicine for say allergies or some other condition that you have to take some low cost medication, the cost of that medication will be -- it will not hold you back from getting coverage from some of the health insurance companies. When the health insurance companies assess your health risk, they are going to look at the cost of drugs and if you have a higher deductible where you are going to have to pay for some of those lower cost drugs on your own because of your deductible, then the health insurance company maybe more likely to approve you for coverage because of the fact that you are absorbing some of those initial cost of those maintenance medication that you maybe on. So there are a couple of reasons, if you are in the early retiree category to buy that higher deductible plan, hold your premiums down and increase the likelihood that you are going to approved for that coverage without any increase in the monthly premium.