Asking for last-minute advice; local people most useful, but any experience helpful

[pameladean]

So I filed our taxes late again and am therefore only now narrowing down the not-very-appetizing choices remaining on MNSure for health insurance for David and me. I found a pretty good and a slightly better plan; the first is through Health Partners and the second through UCare. Both of them have a lot of complaints on the BBB site and scattered about here and there. My mother, who used to work for an insurance company and still has an interest in how they operate, is not very enthusiastic about Health Partners, though the anecdotal evidence she has is somewhat outdated. Health Partners seems to have inspired a lot more annoyance and dislike in the people it billed for premiums they had paid, whose doctors it made repeatedly re-authorize the same prescriptions, and so on. I have had a UCare plan before and, aside from having a very primitive website, they did not do anything egregious during the year I was their customer. But the Health Partners plan has a lower co-insurance and a lower co-pay. What to do, what to do? I'm leaning towards UCare, partly because they use the Fairview provider network.

A major annoyance in all this is that no plan available on the exchange includes HCMC in its network. I've been at HCMC since 2002 and I really don't want to leave, but we are eligible for quite a hefty subsidy on the exchange and really couldn't afford any health insurance if we had to pay all of it. But I am viewing all other provider networks with a very jaundiced eye. Anyway--

If anybody has experience with either provider that seems relevant to this choice, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks so much. One day I will make a post with actual content.

P.S. The upshot of the last problem I asked for advice about was that lsanderson most kindly came over and took down all the tiny trees with a Sawsall and a green-wood blade. He did this on the last day before it snowed for the first time back in November. I failed to bundle up the branches in time for the last yard-waste pickup of the year and was still contemplating doing so and calling the city, as the city say sone may, to arrange for an out-of-the-ordinary yard-waste pickup. In the meantime I took coffeeem's recommendation of A-Tree Service, and they dealt with the larger trees that had got tangled up in the powerl ines, and with the one branch of the Chinese elm that was hanging threateningly over the garage and rubbing on the tree's main trunk while it did so. The day, which involved Xcel energy's dropping the power lines and the power consequently being out for about five hours, felt quite traumatic at the time, but it all worked out well aside from the hole left in the bank account. As a very nice bonus, when they cleaned up all the branches they had cut themselves they also took all of Larry's. Thanks to all who made suggestions and recommendations.

Pamela

Comments

[pameladean]

Thanks very much for the information. The plan we'd have is, to my great amusement, called Peak Individual; but as you say, there should be a lot of similarities. I'm very much encouraged by your long experience with Health Partners.

I have checked the formulary and that part is all good. I am taking a lot of medications, but they are all bog-standard generics and usually give no trouble when I'm trying to choose an insurance plan.

As best I understand it, HCMC is a standalone system. It's pretty big just on its own. I started there in the ER with incidentally-detected staggeringly-high blood pressure. They determined that it would not kill me immediately and referred me on to the Downtown Medicine Clinic, where I was treated very well until 2013, when the influx of new patients from the ACA made it very difficult to get an appointment in less than nine or ten weeks. The scheduler said they were hiring new people as fast as they could, but for the short term suggested that I try the new Whittier Clinic, which is right at 28th and Nicollet. I've really loved going there. It's walking distance from our house in reasonably decent weather, and they used a lot of patient input in its design. It has a tiny rain garden and native plants and trees in the landscaping. Everybody there is very nice and very helpful. HCMC in general has really good mammography technicians.

There are other HCMC clinics in other locations; the only one I can recall offhand is in Richfield.
P.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Note that we have years of experience with Park Nicollet, not Health Partners. HP and PN merged just a few years ago. I was apprehensive about that, but they seem to have done a surprisingly good job of it. The Park Nicollet system still operates as a semi-autonomous network within the larger Health Partners.

[pameladean]

Whoops, sorry. I used Park Nicollet myself in the eighties and early nineties, though I don't even recall now who the actual insurance provider was.

P.