But there’s good news. Beyond the annual physical and some wellness benefits, there are some great advantages hidden deep in most policies, things that you’ll actually want to use to improve your health. While most of us would rather drive a cranky relative to the airport than closely read an insurance policy, there is valuable information to be discovered if you’ll only take a moment.
The better news is that the insurance company wants you to use these benefits. That’s why they’re in the policy, in the belief that they will provide a greater quality of health care and thus reduce your overall cost from various acquired ailments.
These include so-called “alternative medicine” benefits that may once have been viewed as pseudo-science but now have moved comfortably into the mainstream as scientific research has uncovered their positive effects.
More Americans than ever are tuning in to the benefits of insurance coverage, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. Gallup, the respected polling organization, reports that only 12.9 percent of U.S. adults were uninsured in the fourth quarter of 2014, down slightly from the same year’s third-quarter results but dropping significantly from the same period a year earlier. Gallup surveyed more than 43,000 people from Oct. 1 to Dec. 30, 2014, to obtain its survey results.