Review Your Medical Insurance For Hidden Freebies
The other day, I was on my company-provided medical insurance website searching for a primary-care physician with and office near my home to schedule a routine physical. After finding what I was looking for, I started snooping around the insurance provider’s website (it’s not very intuitive or easy to navigate) since I couldn’t quite recall what my co-pays, deductibles, etc were. In the corner, there was a link named “benefit extras” with a gold-mine of unadvertised benefits I’d never heard of before such as discount fitness club memberships, discounts on eye exams and glasses/contact lenses, and even 20% off Lasik procedures.
Read and Reread Your Statement Of Benefits
All of the benefits above and more were unadvertised and buried deep on the benefits website. Perhaps they want to be able to say they offer all these benefits but don’t want anybody to actually take advantage of them. I’m not sure why they aren’t touted, since they add up to pretty significant savings on things many people will buy anyway. For instance, my policy doesn’t offer vision insurance at all (from what I can tell, few policies do anymore) but the 50% discount on eye exams and prescription lenses amount to what you could call respectable coverage on these common expenses. As an elective surgery usually running several thousand dollars, Lasik is almost never covered by insurance. 20% of several thousand dollars is a substantial chunk of change. And as regular readers may know, I’m a big proponent of working out at home using inexpensive fitness equipment or just your own body weight, but for those of you who prefer the gym, that discount could save you hundreds of dollars per year. Since healthy policy-holders make profitable policy-holders, I wouldn’t be surprised if most policies included some sort of health club discount provision.
My point is, there may be plenty of products or service you are currently paying full price for that are eligible for a discount under your insurance policy. I had no idea until I spent an hour searching my provider’s website. It never hurts to look.
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Great suggestion which I will act on. One follow-up: If you own any individual stocks, check those company websites for shareholder benefits. For example, I own stock in Berkshire Hathaway which gets me discounts at Geico.
Excellent suggestion. I had heard that about BRK. I bet plenty of other companies do that as well.