The majority of the self-employed will need to be patient for a few more years as it’s going to take time to build and establish the state run health insurance exchanges that were written into The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The new state run insurance exchanges are expected to be up and by January 2014.This may or may not prove beneficial to sole proprietors that are looking to purchase a self employed health insurance plan .
The state run insurance exchanges will be there for all individuals who are unable to locate an affordable health insurance policy through any of the other insurance markets. This should be a boost for the self-employed because they will have the opportunity to purchase an insurance policy at an affordable rate. They will also receive the potential of tax benefits that will be credited to their 1040 tax form.
At the present time, the self-employed are left to struggle with very few options for insurance coverage. Self-employed individuals who have an employed spouse will benefit the most by being added to his or her employer-sponsored insurance policy. Actually, this tends to be what many sole propritors do to save money , at least until the state run insurance exchanges are operational.
The other main choice for the self-employed is to speak with health insurance brokers or agents for a limited insurance policy that will cover catastrophic care. As a final resort, there are temporary health insurance policies and sports insurance policies, but these are expensive and offer very little in the way of health care coverage. Additionally ,access to the sports insurance policies is only available to those that have an assocationwith a sponsored sport league.
Another issue to be concerned with is if your local hospital and physician will accept these various insurance coverages. There are many occasions when a physician, dental office, and local community hospital have pre-arrangements with certain individual insurance providers such as Kaiser health insurance. Because of these pre arrangements you could be refused coverage,for the health insurance plan that you have which is outside of their pre arranged coverages. One exception is the community hospital, which won’t deny you coverage. Though they won’t deny you coverage, the expenses that you will be obligated to pay are usually very high, which will certainly keep you away from the local community hospital at least until you get a health insurance plan that’s accepted by the hospital