Health insurance for diabetics in Florida

Diabetics face difficult challenges finding and keeping individual health insurance. For those not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid or employer-provided group coverage, the health plan choices are severely limited. Freedom Benefits offers a range of reference materials to help explain the laws that govern this area of health insurance as well as a list of specific insurance plans and other coverage options.

This article is intended to serve as a quick checklist of available options and not as a detailed discussion of each possibility. While the insurance plans listed on this page are available to diabetics, all have some exclusions, limitations and waiting periods for specific medical benefits, treatments and diabetic supplies. The details for each insurance plan will be listed separately on the enrollment Web pages.

Florida is one of the 17 states without a high risk health insurance plan. At the time this article was written, the state had not determined whether to operate a high risk insurance plan as proposed under recent federal health insurance reform for 2011. Meanwhile, the following insurance options may help provide some relief for diabetics who need some type of coverage:

• Core health insurance - open to all, renewable, defined limited benefits. Average cost $179/month*
• Basic Health Insurance - open to all, renewable, defined limited benefits. Average cost $121/month*
• Value 24 Hour Accident coverage - this is not insurance, open to all, renewable, supplemental. Average cost $55/month*
• PPO medical discount plan - this is not insurance, open to all. Average cost $30/month*
• Health clinics in Florida available to patients without insurance - Cost may be based on income.
• OnlineAdviser  - personal help with finding insurance, available to all. No charge.
• "Health insurance with Diabetes" - legal background and health insurance reform issues that affect diabetics
• More information on Florida health insurance and regulations

While all of these health insurances plans do have substantial gaps in diabetes coverage due to policy deductibles, waiting periods, benefit exclusions, co-payments It is usually possible to overlap two or more of the insurance choices in order to improve overall coverage and reduce net out-of-pocket costs. Supplemental health insurance makes direct payments, also referred to as defined or scheduled cash benefits, directly to the policyholder in addition to benefits that are covered by other medical insurance. While this does not directly cover the diabetes treatment, it does reduce the overall out-of-pocket medical costs of the covered person. This can be useful, for example, when a major medical policy has strong maximum benefits but a long writing period and high deductible, whereas a supplemental policy with lower benefits has no deductible and a shorter waiting period. For clarification and confirmation of stacked supplemental policy benefits, check the "Coordination of Benefits" provisions of the supplemental policy being considered.

^*Average cost is provided for illustrative purposes only and will vary depending on many factors including your location, age, sex, family status. For our purposes, we use the lowest estimated premium for a 45 year old single male living in the state capital  selecting the most popular plan. The information on this page is compiled from publications of third parties including the American Diabetes Association and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Because insurance information changes frequently, verify all information with the primary health plan enrollment sources.