Health Insurance Transparency Needs to be a Thing

I'm all for the increase in salary transparency I've been seeing recently. Salary transparency allows people to stay informed and take greater control over their careers.

For our family, however, the salaries aren't the most important part of our compensation-our health insurance is.

Our daughter is on the autism spectrum and requires a lot of expensive therapy-therapy that isn't covered by many insurance plans. When I say expensive, I mean expensive. Last year, her therapy claims came in at around 3x our combined family income. The center she goes to doesn't even allow families to pay out of pocket.

When I was employed as a public school teacher, I had health insurance coverage through my work. Even with an active policy on which I was the primary insured, it was nearly impossible to find out if the insurance plan covered the therapy. I called United Health many times and their response was, "you'll need to file a claim. We'll either approve it or deny it."

In other words, I had to choose and enroll in a health plan before I could even determine if it was going to cover what we needed.

My husband's open enrollment last year wasn't much better. I knew we needed a new plan where we'd have a lower out-of-pocket maximum. Unfortunately, there was no way to confirm the new plan covered what we needed. I selected the new one and held my breath until the first of the year when her therapist was able to confirm that the new plan did indeed provide the same coverage as the old one.

Our insurance needs mean that my husband and I can't always take advantage of career opportunities that come along if we can't guarantee we'll have the same health coverage. And in most cases, we can't even find out if a plan will cover us until we actually enroll. It's an unfair system that takes advantage of people at their most vulnerable.

Insurance companies need to be more transparent with their coverage before forcing members to sign up for a plan and HR departments need to hold them accountable to a higher standard of transparency.