Open enrollment for health insurance begins every year on Nov. 1 through Jan. 15 in most states. If you want your coverage to begin on Jan. 1 you need to enroll in a plan by Dec.15. A handful of states with their own marketplaces have slightly different open enrollment periods. Open enrollment periods for employer-sponsored health insurance plans vary by the employer. The employer chooses the period when employees can make changes to benefits.
Health insurance is expensive because healthcare itself is costly. Blue Cross Blue Shield says medical care accounts for 90% of health insurance spending. Other factors cited for high health insurance costs include administrative expenses and costly medical technology.
In most states, it is not illegal to have no health insurance. A handful of states require health insurance: California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as Washington, D.C. All but Vermont have tax penalties for residents who don’t have health insurance. Vermont mandates health insurance but there isn’t a monetary penalty.
Aetna, UnitedHealthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield-affiliated plans offer health insurance to residents in all 50 states. That doesn’t mean all of these companies offer plans in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. For example, UnitedHealthcare sells health insurance in all states but has ACA marketplace plans in only 23 states.
The best health insurance companies in our analysis are Kaiser Permanente and Blue Cross Blue Shield, which both received five stars. We looked at complaints made to state insurance departments, quality ratings from the National Committee for Quality Assurance, health plan deductibles, breadth of health plans and metal tier offerings in the ACA health insurance marketplace.
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Deputy Editor, InsuranceLes Masterson is a deputy editor and insurance analyst at Forbes Advisor. He has been a journalist, reporter, editor and content creator for more than 25 years. He has covered insurance for a decade, including auto, home, life and health. Before covering insurance, Les was a news editor and reporter for Patch and Community Newspaper Company and also covered health care, mortgages, credit cards and personal loans for multiple websites.
Health Insurance ExpertA. Mark Fendrick, M.D., is Director at the University of Michigan Center for Value-Based Insurance Design. He is a professor of internal medicine in the School of Medicine and a professor of health management and policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He’s an expert in health insurance and developed value-based insurance design (VBID), a health insurance payment model that incentivizes quality.
He completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania where he was a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program.
His research focuses on how clinical payment and consumer engagement initiatives influence access to care, quality of care and healthcare costs.
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