Tips For Reevaluating Your Healthcare Spending

Mary E. Ward
Guest Correspondent

All you have to do is listen in on the debates and conflicts centered on health care reform and you get some clue as to how astronomical the costs can become. For those who must spend money on health care expenses the need for ways to evaluate the expenses becomes more important. In fact, some tips for reevaluating your healthcare spending may be crucial to your long-term financial stability.

Here are four tips that you might consider when trying to evaluate the effectiveness of your health care spending.

Preventing rather than spending – What does this mean? Well, ask yourself whether you are doing what you can to avoid health issues completely. What form can prevention take? It is a matter of common sense that eating nutritious foods and exercising regularly can make a difference as far as your health is concerned. Additionally, you should get enough sleep each night. The less sleep you get the less down time your body gets to repair the day’s damage. (Of course, if you are smoker, you might consider quitting so you lower your risks for cancer and lung-related diseases.) Prevention might also mean education. The more you know about certain illnesses the more steps you can take to marginalize its impact should you contract it. As a rule, prevention is one of the best ways to lower personal health care costs, so it is also something that you keep in mind when reevaluating health-care spending.

Medical bill errors – Once you have certain level medical bills, you might grow complacent about fact checking every statement you receive in the mail. Yet, if you want to assess the affects of health-care spending, you should consider the possibility of medical billing errors. Though easy to overlook, you may be paying more than you really owe. All it takes is one inaccurate item to dramatically increase spending on health care.

Using generic drugs – When you are looking over your health care spending, prescription drugs may rate high on your list. The fact is that these types of drugs can be very expense—especially when you buy the brand name products. As with other generic items like foods, you can save yourself a considerable amount of money if you use generic drugs rather than their expensive, brand name counterparts. According to the FDA, the typical patient may save as much as 15% a day if they use generic prescription drugs. This could translate into 52% if all of the drugs used are exchanged for generics.

Discount clinics – A last area where you might consider when reevaluating your health care spending involves what you spend making a normal trip to the doctor’s office. It may be that the best way to get spending down is find walk-in or discount clinic that will provide the same basic services as a normal doctor’s office but at a lower cost. These facilities will let those without insurance coverage pay a small flat rate for certain services. Those that do have coverage could use the clinics to save money on their co-pays.

There are different factors that may influence the cost of health care. What you spend on yearly health care expenditures may be something you can monitor and even control if you consider different aspects. The key is to make changes where you can.

Mary E. Ward blogs about how to become a phlebotomy technician.