How we choose
Six ideas, about a minute each. By the end you’ll be able to judge any health plan in the country — including ours.
Your premium is the one number you are certain to pay. Twelve months of it, whether you see a doctor or not. We always show it annualized, because a plan that looks $40 cheaper a month is really $480 a year — and that’s money you have already spent before any care happens.
Wellpoint Essential Gold 1500
$7,101
a year, before any care — that’s the Floor.
Real 2024 Texas plan-year rate. Age 40, non-tobacco.
Add your Floor to the most the plan can ever ask you to chip in — the out-of-pocket maximum — and you get the worst year money can do to you. We call it your Maximum Annual Exposure. Insurance is a promise about bad years, so this is the number that says what the promise is actually worth.
MAE
$12,101
In-network covered care. Out-of-network bills sit outside this cap — that’s what CareCheck is for.
Now put every plan in your county on one chart. Some of them cost more than another plan and protect you less. There is no version of your year — healthy, unlucky, catastrophic — where those plans come out ahead. Economists call them dominated. We call them the Never List, and in Texas it’s about nine plans in ten. See the Texas numbers →
Green survives. Grey is the Never List.
What’s left is a handful of plans, each one the cheapest possible route to its own level of safety. That’s your Short List — usually four or five plans out of a couple of hundred. Every one of them is defensible. The only question left is how much protection you want to buy.
TK
Pending the Texas frontier file
Wellpoint Essential Gold 1500
Floor $7,101 · MAE $12,101
TK
Pending the Texas frontier file
TK
Pending the Texas frontier file
Remaining rungs TK until the Texas frontier file is wired in.
Moving up the Short List always costs premium and always buys protection. So we price it: pay this much more per month, and your worst case drops by that much. Divide one by the other and you get the honest exchange rate — cents per dollar of protection. Some rungs are fourteen cents. Some are forty-nine. Same shelf.
Pay
$363/yr
Cuts your worst case by
$2,600
14¢ per $1 protected — worth it if you’d hit the cap more than 14% of years.
Only one thing here is personal: the most you could absorb in a bad year without it wrecking you. That’s your Safety Number, and it decides where you stop on the Ladder — not a guess about how much healthcare you’ll use. We never ask you to predict your own illness, because nobody can.
Ask yourself one question:
“If this year went as badly as it possibly could, what’s the number I could pay without going into debt?”
Buy the cheapest plan whose Maximum Annual Exposure sits at or under that number. That’s the whole method.
If you already know you’re a heavy, predictable spender — an ongoing treatment, a specialty drug, a scheduled surgery — then your year isn’t a coin flip, and the middle of the plan matters as much as the ends. Bring us your prescriptions and your providers and we’ll work the details by hand. We’d rather do that than sell you a method that doesn’t fit your life.
Talk to a person →Two questions, no account. Or read the full methodology and data sources first.
