Bcbs Fitness Reimbursement: Fill & Download for Free

Find an independent insurance broker, who represents a variety of companies & plans. If you have conventional health insurance through your employer or affinity group (e.g., union, professional association), ask who they use as a broker. That’s what my husband & I did—we used the guy who handles the insurance for the employees of his small medical practice.Also, talk to your doctors (better yet, their office managers) about which insurance companies they’ve found cover the most services & supplies, and how fully & quickly they get reimbursed. The latter is important because it reduces the chance that you will be billed before the provider gets paid (or even receive a “late notice” or even threat to be dunned by a collection agency). Also, if you are considering an managed-care “Advantage” plan (essentially an HMO with low premiums, which includes drug coverage instead of making you buy a PartD supplement, as well as some vision and maybe dental), ask the doctors and hospitals in your area (state, county, town) in which (if any) panels or networks they participate. You might also find that though the drugs have a cheap (or even no) co-pay, they may not be the ones your doctors prefer and you may be limited to a single pharmacy (Walgreen’s, Wal-Mart, mail order*) inconveniently located.Finally, if you want a separate Part D plan (especially if you have a specific medical problem or have recently been diagnosed—as I was), make a list of the drugs you take and anticipate being prescribed, as well as the pharrmacies you prefer. Then go to the Part D carriers’ websites and look up the drugs on their “formulary” lists. Not all carriers cover every drug, or if they do they might assign it to a different (and more expensive) “tier.” They may also have lists of preferred and non-preferred but “participating” pharmacies, which will affect your co-pay.AARP pushes plans from United Health (both HMO and fee-for service), and we used to have United’s Choice Plus PPO before we got Medicare. Depending on your medical needs and where you live, AARP’s policies may be a good fit for you. But as a doctor, my husband found that BCBS covers more stuff (especially durable equipment like braces, crutches, walkers, wheelchairs and other disability aids, home blood pressure & glucose monitors, etc.), approves it more quickly, and pays doctors faster too. So after consulting with his own practice’s broker—who tried to sell us on a different company because it had a lower premium—he nonetheless went with BCBS; and once I turned 65, so did I.___________________________*When I had United, they eventually decided they would no longer cover “maintenance meds” (those you’ve filled >3 times in a row) unless purchased through their mail-order pharmacy. True, it was much cheaper, but I always seemed to find out that I would run out during an upcoming vacation—and it was not always possible to get a rush order or approval for an advance “stopgap” supply before leaving town; sometimes I even had to get a separate prescription for that interim quantity and pay out of pocket—which often cost me more than an entire month’s worth of the insured prescription.

I can’t speak for life insurance, but I don’t think previous mental health assessments are taken into consideration when being given a life insurance policy. Now, actually handing out the money after a person has died of suicide is an entirely different matter and depends on the policy in question, but I don’t think it would prevent a policy in the first place.With the current state of health insurance in America, pre-existing conditions can’t be held against you. If that were to ever change and we were to go back to how it was pre-2008, then yes, insurance companies could choose not to provide you with some or all health insurance, depending on what’s going on. They could give you an insurance policy but refuse to cover your psychiatric medication, or therapy appointments, or visits with your psychiatrist. Or they could require you to carry a separate ‘mental health’ policy that costs significantly more than your ‘normal health’ policy. That’s almost how it works currently with Florida BCBS, actually; mental health is considered a separate ‘department’ that we have to go through any time we try to reimburse therapy visits. (Very few therapists in the area will take insurance anymore, so we almost might as well not have insurance at all.)Now, having been denied insurance for mental health reasons didn’t happen to me personally, but I was denied coverage for physical therapy, pain killers, and any treatment related to arthritis before the ACA kicked in, so the same happening for mental health isn’t entirely out of the question.Being involuntarily hospitalized: okay, so, this is incredibly touchy and I don’t ever want to discourage someone from talking to their doctor if they actually are suicidal and have a plan but let’s talk honestly about it - the risk of this happening, if you are in the United State, depends on the state. In some states the laws are more… slippery than others. I have not personally been committed, but both my partner and my mother were ‘Baker Acted’ within two weeks of each other, so I can only speak for their experiences and my own, on the outside.The Baker Act is a Florida-specific law that allowed involuntary hospitalization of anyone determined to be a danger to themselves or others, at which point they’ll be held for up to 72 hours to make sure they’re okay. (This may be up to interpretation; the law apparently says ‘up to 72 hours’, but in both of my experiences, the doctors interpreted it as ‘minimum of 72 hours’.) Mental health professionals, physicians, judges, and law enforcement officers are some of the people allowed to trigger a Baker Act.My mother left a suicide note on her Facebook page, claiming she’d swallowed a bunch of pills. Someone she knew from Facebook, who knew where she lived, someone got in touch with local police. The police came, got into the house, and Baker Acted her. From my experience on the outside, it was absolutely horrific. The hospital she was taken to had one hour a week in which we were allowed to visit her, and we were not allowed to see their housing area. It was literally a prison. To my (extremely limited understanding), there was no actual therapy and there may have been assault between patients. I’m not sure they even gave her what medicine she was prescribed. It did absolutely nothing to help her. It only destroyed her friendship with that person on Facebook and made her determined to never discuss suicide in public again, giving us much less opportunity to help her. (As an aside, it’s still unknown to me if she actually overdosed. Given she was lucid the whole time, I don’t think she actually did. It’s my personal belief she posted it in a fit of rage and wasn’t aware of the potential consequences.)About two weeks later, my partner had a breakdown. She was unmedicated, having never been medicated, and had been struggling with suicidal thoughts for years. She finally admitted this to her therapist, and her therapist convinced her to check in for a night at a local hospital. She agreed, because she was exhausted and thought being away from home for the night would be good for her. I’m not sure if she was actually a risk to herself or not that night, it’s very fuzzy in the memory for her. I’m also not sure whether or not she actually had a proper interview with the hospital to determine her mental state. Either way, the next morning the hospital refused to let her leave, and threatened to use the Baker Act on her if she didn’t stay, which would restart the 72 hours over to whenever the papers were actually filed. I personally suspect the therapist lied and Baker Acted her behind her back, but I can’t say for sure.That hospital wasn’t… terrible. There were a good 10 visiting hours a day, and I spent probably 7 of them with her, however many I could. I was allowed in the housing area and ate lunch and dinner with her (bringing my own food, of course). But there was no therapy, they screwed around with her pain medication, and all it did was ensure that my partner will never, ever discuss suicide with anyone outside the family ever again. (It did finally get her in to see a psychiatrist and on to good medication, so there’s that going for it, but…)There’s a lot of discussion going on about the Baker Act in Florida. It’s being used more and more on children, and there’s arguments that because it’s so easy for people in authority to trigger, that it’s being used improperly. In fact, it wasn’t until 2015 that the law was changed to require that parents be notified if their child is committed. Literally, someone Baker Acted a kid for 72 hours and nobody thought it was important to tell her parents. How incredibly terrifying is that?So anyway, tl;dr - your mileage may vary, it really depends on where you live. I don’t think it’s anywhere near as easy to commit a person outside Florida. Florida has a really bad reputation when it comes to mental health anything. But I can tell you that, as a resident of Florida, I will never tell a doctor, therapist, and especially not a law enforcement officer that I am suicidal. Even if it’s true, the resulting hospitalization is terrifying. If I’m suicidal, I’ll only tell the people I trust, and let them make the decisions on whether or not I should be committed.