Quick Tips
The Simple Way I Just Saved $100 on My Health Insurance Premium
For all of the excitement that often comes with the new year, there are admittedly some pain in the butt things you need to put up with as well. Case in point: re-upping your health insurance. While I was lucky enough to escape a major price hike on my premiums in 2020, there were some changes to my coverage that were less than thrilling — but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to discuss the rewards program my insurer offers that allowed me to save $100 on my premium this month for only doing a few minutes of work.
As I was exploring my updated policy paperwork for this year, I discovered that my insurer Ambetter has a program called My Health Pays. After clicking the link from my dashboard, I was taken to the My Health Pays portal, which contained challenges and tips I could review. Of course, these bits of info and advice weren’t just for fun — they also had a point value attached to them. In some cases, reading a PDF about healthy eating might earn you 10 points while watching a video about keeping hydrated may earn you 25 points. I was surprised to see that were even some tips related to personal finance.
So what can these points earn you? While Ambetter does offer various collections of prizes such as “Move More Rewards,” “Eat Right Rewards,” “Save Smart Rewards,” and “Be Well Rewards,” I found the best value to come from My Health Pays debit card option. Instead of getting a Google Home (valued at $79) for 1,456 points or an air fryer (valued at $53.46 at the moment) for 1,366 points, I could put $100 on a debit card for 1,000 points. Notably, this isn’t a regular debit card that you can just use anywhere, but I’d still rather take the cash than the fairly random items they offer.
It turns out that the current form of My Health Pays is the evolution of a preview program under which I earned a debit card loaded with $25 (the bonus for completing a 10k a couple of years ago). Because of this, within a couple of days of cashing out my points, I saw that the $100 had made its way to my card. From there, I was able to prepay part of my premium for the month. Better yet, this one-time bonus payment didn’t disrupt my set autopay, so kudos to Ambetter for making that process easy.
With My Health Pays recently concluding a holiday challenge where you logged your exercise time for each day (you needed to log at least 22 minutes to earn points for the day), I am already nearing another $25 on top of the $100 I cashed in. Then again, I’ve also blown through everything they currently offer, so it’ll be a bit before I can rack up points again. Still, even if it was just the $100 I ended up with, I’m quite pleased with how little work I needed to put in to earn it.
Obviously I can’t really speak to what other similar types of programs are out there for insurers other than Ambetter — but, if I were you, I’d take an extra look around your health insurance website to see if you too can score some easy money.
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Never have thought of looking around with my insurance. Better start doing so and I might able to get some bonus.
This gives me the idea of reading through my insurance policy.