[Note - If you don't live in the U.S., your only reason to care about this post is probably to satisfy your morbid curiosity about health insurance in our country. It's best that I stop here before I go into an uncontrollable rant about that...]
For a lot of us Americans, it’s that fun time of year when Fall arrives, the temperatures cool, in many areas the leaves turn, and we sit down to try to decipher what our health insurance ‘options’ are for the coming year. Around October is when many companies hold their annual period where employees can pick, among other things, their health insurance plan for the next calendar year. Whether it’s called “Open Enrollment”, the “Election Period” or some other dorky term, the idea is the same – except for birth, death, or marriage, you can only change your insurance plan once a year with your employer, and during this period is the time to do it.
[Note - One other exception is that when you start a new job that actually offers benefits, you can do all this then too, regardless of what time of year it falls.]
Assuming you have any choice at all, you’ll spend quite a bit of time trying to unravel what the various plans claim they’ll cover you for, all while knowing full well that you’re paying your premiums in the shaky hopes that they’ll pay any claims at all should you commit the sin of actually getting sick. [insert additional sarcasm here] Eventually you may end up just throwing a dart at the wall and picking whichever plan it lands on.
But usually buried down in all that benefits stuff is one gold nugget that every parent of an autistic child should very strongly consider getting – a flexible spending account.
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