Living temporarily in the USA - need Health Insurance

[ILoveJamaica]

My DD is going to be living and working in the USA for a while. Her job does come with some Health Insurance, but I'm think she ought to top it up, so that she has an all singing / all dancing cover. Has anyone done this and who did you use? TIA

She needs to talk it through with HR at work.
There will likely be various plan options she can enroll in at various costs and which ones make sense for her will be very circumstance specific.

It doesn't have to be all singing-all dancing. A lot of Americans just get emergency cover only, and pay for office appointments. If your DD gets cover through her employer, it will probably be OK.

Is your DD otherwise fit and healthy?

BTW,

We used Cigna expatriate insurance which pretty much mapped to what we would get on the NHS, give or take.

Find out exactly what the insurance covers. Plans are required now by law to cover everything major.

If it’s only a few months and your DD is healthy then it’s likely she won’t even use the insurance.

Be warned that even having excellent insurance doesn’t mean no medical costs. Usually you have a deductible which is like an insurance excess, so you have to meet this amount before insurance pays out. Ours was 3k per year. That usually means a couple of hundred dollars per doctors appointment, and then the cost for prescriptions is hugely variable. Generic medication is usually a lot cheaper than branded.

Also if there should be an emergency then different plans are accepted by different hospitals. for example, if she should get taken to hospital and she’s “out of network” then she’ll be hit with a bill for all her treatment at that hospital. I would advise checking which of her local doctors and hospitals accept her insurance in case she gets a choice in where to go. We selected our insurance as it was definitely accepted by our local hospital network. Most of the big companies are