Trying to find individual health insurance can be a real pain—long forms, confusing terms, and the same information repeated over and over.  However, much as it pays to be a little organized before you pull together your taxes, a little prep work can make looking for health insurance much, much easier.  Pull this data together for you and whoever else will be getting coverage before you look online or visit a broker:

 

1)    Basic data. You probably don’t find it hard to remember your own address and Social Security number, but if you are filling out an application for others or letting a broker handle it this data can be handy.

2)    Current insurance info. Gather all the information about your current provider, including their name, address, and phone number; your policy number; and how long you’ve had the coverage.

3)    Past insurance info.  Some applications require information for the provider before your current one as well.

4)    Your medical records.  If you’re lucky your medical provider has this online.  If you’re not lucky, like most people, you can try using a free service such as

Simplee or Cake Health, which go into your insurance websites and pull out information about your past visits.  And if even those don’t work for you, you’re going to have to go back through paper bills to write down when you went to the doctor and the pharmacy.  Note dates of visits, what they were for, the name and contact info of the doctor, and any diagnosis or treatment that came from the visit.  You might have to dust off some old records; some providers want the information as far back as 10 years.

5)    Immunization records.  If this isn’t included in your list of medical visits already, make a note of the immunizations you and other covered members have had.

 

Getting all this information together can definitely be daunting, but once it’s in place you’ll find that it makes the process of applying for insurance policies a lot easier.  Good luck!

 

-- Written by Tomer Shoval, CEO of free health care management site Simplee.  Visit Simplee to understand, track, and manage your health care expenses today.