 Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation Vision Care Insurance Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance is part of our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we follow the adage of measure twice, cut once, putting a formal plan in place, looking something like set the insurance goals, develop a plan to reach your goals, put the plan in action, review the results, and repeat the process periodically. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia Vision Care Insurance, which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This is by Julia Kagan, updated October 5th, 2021. In prior presentations, we've been thinking about insurance in general. Then we move to the medical insurance, which can be a little bit more confusing for a couple of reasons we'll touch on shortly. And then we move to the dental insurance and now to the vision insurance, which have some characteristics that are more similar to the medical insurance. So just a quick recap. When you look at classical kind of insurance, like liability insurance, like the property insurance and the life insurance, you're typically safeguarding against any event, which you're hoping doesn't happen in the future, has a low probability possibly of happening. But if it did happen, it would be financially devastating, such as the house burning down, getting sued for millions of dollars, or dying prematurely. So you want to then safeguard and have the insurance against that event happening just due to the magnitude of the financial impact it would have if it were to happen, hoping that it doesn't. But with the medical insurance, you have a similar kind of thing because you could have a big medical bill, a big medical problem that would cost you a lot of money. But you also have this expansion that it's going to cover kind of the more routine type of things. When we move to the dental insurance and now the vision insurance, you've got some overlap with what would be covered, say, in medical insurance under certain conditions that might be related to your eye or your teeth or your mouth or something like that and what's covered by the vision care and the dental care. And you've got a little bit of a shift away from the classical insurance, which you're basically trying to safeguard against a big event that you're hoping doesn't happen. But if it did happen, it would be financially devastating to something that might be helping you pay for the standard visits that you're going to be putting in place and possibly using some combination of medical insurance, vision or dental if we're talking about dental too and your own kind of self-insurance savings to cover potential needs and lower or mitigate the risk. Okay, keep in that in mind, what is vision care insurance? Vision care insurance will often cover routine eye health expenses such as eye exam, contact lens fittings, contact lenses and eyeglass lenses and frames. Some plans may even provide a discount on LASIK procedures and other corrective surgeries. So a vision care plan may cover the cost of these items in total up to a preset limit or it may require the policy or a holder to pay a flat fee or percentage fee to share the expense with the insurer. Understanding vision care insurance. Vision care insurance tends to be inexpensive compared to other types of insurance because many of the covered costs are predictable and expensive claims are rare. So in other words, notice when you're looking at the kind of normal wear and tear on your eyes similar to the wear and tear on your teeth if it's just over age in other words if you didn't get like in a car accident and had some kind of you got reconstructive something that needs to happen with your eye or something like that which might fall under the medical area. If you're just talking about the wear and tear on eyes as they as you get older it's a little bit easier for us to be able to predict those things as opposed to on the medical side of things where something can come out of nowhere and you're visiting specialists for reasons that you don't exactly know what is going on. So the fact that it's more predictable means that you might have less of that outside risk kind of thing like your house burning down and having this huge huge cost for example that comes out of nowhere because hopefully those big things that might happen from the medical side would be covered say with the medical insurance if you got in some kind of accident or something like that. So that's what the vision care is covering most likely more of those kind of things that you can predict more often as you grow older with vision. So it resembles a discount plan more closely than an actual insurance plan because insurance protects against unforeseen and potentially catastrophic expenses. So again notice the shift that is happening here you're kind of thinking about the vision insurance not really to ensure against that big catastrophic event but more to see if it's going to help to pay for the more routine maintenance kind of stuff that is predictable and you're going to have to do at some point most likely so it's essential you fully understand each plan's costs and the benefits they come with vision care insurance. Take a look at the price for one year of vision insurance compared with the cost of an eye exam. Although vision care insurance is inexpensive it may not be a good deal for the consumer if the premiums and co-payments under the plan are higher than paying for vision care expenses out of pocket. So if you're shifting the goal from okay I'm guarding against a long term a big event that might happen to lower the risk to unbind vision insurance mainly to pay for the more routine maintenance kind of stuff then you got to think about well how exactly is that going to work am I going to save on that routine maintenance stuff can I self insure against the bigger kind of costs that might happen related to my vision. So special considerations eye diseases which are unpredictable and expensive to treat will generally be covered by health insurance not vision care insurance so notice this overlap between the vision care and the health so it could be a little bit confusing because you might say well yeah I could have an accident to my eye or I could have a big a big disease or something that is related to my eyes but then the question is well is that covered under the vision care or is it covered under the medical. So if it's under the medical that would make more sense from a traditional standpoint because the medical is going to have that out of pocket limit that kind of gives you that cap that the insurance will kick in over that over that time frame so the vision might be more for like the routine kind of maintenance stuff. So vision care coverage through many employers sponsored health plans generally works a little differently than other health insurance and major medical insurance plans because eye exams can detect hidden medical problems even those with perfect vision should get one from time to time as someone ages they'll need more frequent vision exams according to Mayo Clinic. So people with poor vision a family history of eye disease or a condition that increases the risk of eye disease like diabetes should have more frequent exams if routine exams are all that will be needed then the cost of insurance probably isn't worth it so in other words if you're buying insurance just for the kind of preventative exam type of stuff and that's all that's going to be covered for it you're probably paying more for insurance than the exams but so then the question would be well what if there's other costs that might come up if I have more visits would I save money on that and should you be purchasing vision insurance at least for some kind of preventative stuff in case you have more you have more problems in a particular year to use it more like a normal kind of insurance instead of like a discount type of thing that you would be purchasing so availability of vision care insurance vision care insurance can often be obtained through your employer association union or government programs like Medicare or Medicaid most vision insurance providers also offer policies that you can purchase individually vision insurance is often a value added benefit linked to indemnity health insurance health maintenance organizations those are the HMO's and the preferred provider organizations those are the PPO's contracted with managed vision care networks to provide eye care services advantages and disadvantages of vision insurance there are benefits and limitations to vision insurance and whether you should get it or not may depend on how badly you need it if you have a history of eye related medical needs it may be worth the extra money to purchase vision insurance if you only go to the eye doctor once a year for routine checkups it might not be necessary for you to buy an expensive eye care insurance plan overall vision care insurance isn't expensive and it may save you money over time especially if you have reoccurring eye care troubles or regularly purchase corrective lenses so if you're obviously if you're doing more stuff in terms of the eye care glasses lenses contact lenses it might be more worth it in that case if you end up needing eye surgery it can help with the cost as well so the eye surgery got that corrective surgery which more and more is becoming not something that's going to be cosmetic I guess or more it'll be more routine even though you might be able to correct with some of it with glasses and stuff like that which is nice if it would cover that surgery as well so cons of vision insurance are that it may not necessarily cover the type of service you need or will not allow you to travel out of its network for treatment in addition if there is a specific brand of lenses you like using or specialized lenses or frames it may offer a limited line of brands so if you're using the insurance to buy your super cool glasses and you like your ray bands lenses or something like that then it might not cover because it might be limited and you've got the same kind of network item involved as well so pros those can often be easily added into insurance plans so you can also buy a plan individually premiums are not expensive the plan the plans all set the cost of corrective lenses which is nice on the cons side of things you may not be able to use out of network services you got that same network thing that we saw with other medical and dental issues so once you set up the insurance you typically have to go to someone within the network to get the most benefit out of the insurance if you don't need regular eye care it may not be worth the money some vision care insurance limits what you can purchase in terms of eye wear what's the bottom line vision care insurance may be helpful to cover routine eye care such as exams fitting and help pay for corrective lenses some plans offer more benefits than others but if you don't have a reason to see an eye doctor more than a regular checkup it might not be a plan even if it is affordable how much does vision insurance cost it depends on your plan but you may pay as little as $5 a month for basic plan from your employer or buying a plan directly from a provider for example the SP vision insurance offers a $13 a month premium is vision insurance separate from health insurance vision insurance is usually sold as an add on to health insurance from your employer or you can purchase it separately what insurance does Walmart vision center take you might ask Walmart's vision center takes its own Walmart vision plan and it is an out of network provider for many vision plans including coal managed vision I med and Davis vision in order to find out if Walmart vision center takes your insurance you must visit its website because it varies by state and location who takes Davis vision insurance David Davis vision insurance offers a wide range of both in network and out of network providers including Walmart vision works Costco for eyes and Sam's club so who takes the SP vision insurance the the SP website claims to have thousands of in network optometrists and ophthalmologists located all over the United States including vision care centers in Costco stores what vision insurance does Costco take Costco website states it quote now accepts most vision insurance plans in quote for its vision care services