What is a health insurance co-payment?

At first, the concept of a co-payment may sound like an inconvenience or an extra expense to be avoided. However, more and more health insurance users are deciding to take out policies that include co-payments as they can lead to significant savings on the total cost of the health services used over the year. How is this possible?

Co-payments are nothing more than small amounts of money that you pay whenever you use a service covered by your health insurance. The cost depends on the type of medical care you receive. Medical visits that are more complicated, or those that require the use of more resources, will have a higher co-payment. This means that in addition to the cost of the insurance premium, any possible costs that will have to be paid as co-payments must be added in as well.

Although this does represent an additional expense, insurance policies with a co-payment tend to be more economical than those without one. In other words, although co-payments can represent additional one-time costs each time you have a need to use the services covered by your health insurance, over time this gets compensated for economically by the fact that the premiums are lower. But now let's take a look at the factors that may help determine whether or not an insurance policy with these characteristics is an interesting option for you.

You only make co-payments when you go to the doctor. Therefore, the co-payment system is best suited to someone who does not need to use medical services on a regular basis.

In addition, if these medical visits require only minimal care and are routine in nature, the cost of the co-payment tends to be much lower. This means that these costs can be easily compensated for by monthly or annual premium payments that are lower than those associated with a policy that has no co-payment.

This means that when selecting a health insurance policy you should consider how much use you will make of the services being offered. You must determine whether it is worthwhile to pay a higher premium for unlimited access to health care, or whether it may be better to reduce the cost of the policy with the understanding that medical care should be relied upon only when really necessary.

Of course, whether or not a policy has a co-payment does not influence the portfolio of services to which you will have access; instead it simply modifies the cost of this access.

Our health is something that we have control over up to a certain point. However, there is no guarantee for anyone, regardless how healthy they may have been in the past, that they will not find themselves in a situation where they must make use of their health insurance more regularly.

And if you have co-payments, frequent visits to the doctor can end up increasing the cost of the premium and eating into the initial savings you made by choosing a less expensive health insurance policy.

Therefore, when choosing a health insurance policy, it is important to think carefully about how you will use it and whether co-payments are a good option. Policies with lower premiums are also the ones with higher co-payments, and vice versa. This means that it is important to consider both the portfolio of services you will choose and the costs associated with the actual use of these.