Debbie Perlman Blog

  A disturbing trend of insurance costs making football prohibitively expensive continues to grow, following the path of other organized youth. Americans just witnessed a historic Super Bowl, but I can’t help but wonder whether football as a sport will soon be history. A disturbing trend of insurance costs making football prohibitively expensive continues to grow, following the path of many other organized youth sports. One of the most troubling consequences, intended or unintended, is the pricing out of the youth players who need team sports the most. As someone who grew up in a household below the poverty line, and whose father didn’t finish high school, I didn’t even have cleats my first year of high school football. Had the other equipment not been provided, I would never have been able to afford to play at all. Similarly, I never had cleats growing up playing baseball. If the bats and helmets were not provided, and the uniforms not ...

Spring is a good time to organize your finances, as you probably have just accessed some records to file your tax return. Try to cut clutter, reduce duplicate accounts and improve digital access. There's never a bad time to take a hard look at your financial life with an eye on cutting clutter and perhaps reducing duplicative account-maintenance fees. But the tax-return filing season can be an especially good opportunity, as you likely have just gone through your files looking for key documents, statements and receipts. Here are five suggestions for simplifying your financial situation: 1. Assess your finances like corporations It's hard to know where you're going without knowing where you are. That's why advisers routinely suggest that people draw up a budget to track income and expenses. Budgets typically are done on a monthly basis. Just be sure to include items that don't recur every month, such as semiannual insurance payments o...

Do your parents have life insurance policies? Are the policies still in force? How much are they paying for these policies? Do they still need them? These are all questions that you must answer to determine what to do with your parents’ life insurance. Follow these seven steps to make sure you and your parents make the right decision. First   you  must find the actual policies . If you cannot find them and your parents insist that they have life insurance, contact the companies and ask them for duplicate copies. Make sure the policies are still in force. Any defunct policies should be destroyed to avoid confusion later. Review the policy to determine who the owner is. The policy may be owned by your mother or father but cannot be owned jointly.   Determine the beneficiary or beneficiaries.  Usually a beneficiary statement is attached to the policy. If the beneficiary was ever changed a new beneficiary statement should have been sent to your pa...

Nowadays the moment we open the newspaper, we read about a case on cancer. And it just knocks us out of our place to think how rampant and common it has become. The C word scare has risen over the years, and to guard ourselves against it we have opted for a healthier lifestyle. But truth be told, diseases like cancer, also known as a critical illness, can happen to anyone at any time in life. And cancer is just the popular evil in the list. There are some many more lurking in the shadows like, kidney failure, stroke, paralysis, meningitis, deafness etc. Critical illness is an uninvited guest that takes a huge toll on both health and wealth and doesn’t want to leave you or your family. So, how do we face such a difficult situation? Well, critical illness definitely takes a toll on your mental and physical well-being, but your financial health can be taken care of with the right insurance coverage. So, before we understand what a critical illness insurance do...

You spend 17280 a day for your health! We're not talking about money though, but about something even more precious, your breath. An average human takes 12 breaths a minute and 17280 a day. That's huge work! Good job! As we don't even realize that breath, we may not realize the value of it. Just like how we don’t understand the value of a sound and healthy life. Most of us we're talking about here, not the ones who do live life mindfully, making every breath count. Yes, life is valuable, and you got it right, we're insurance after all. So somehow, we'll get to protection and insurance. Bingo, we are talking about something very essential that its bigger than you or us, it's about your health, your life, your happiness and of course health insurance plans follows. And because we are going to launch our health insurance plans soon, we thought we should start with simplifying the understanding of health insurance there as well, Bac...

Only 12 percent of older Americans have some form of dental insurance and fewer than half visited a dentist in the previous year, suggests new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research on Medicare beneficiaries. Insurance status appeared to be the biggest predictor of whether a person received oral health care: For those with incomes just over the federal poverty level, 27 percent of those without dental insurance had a dental visit in the previous year, compared to 65 percent with dental insurance, according to an analysis of 2012 Medicare data. Income also played a role: High-income beneficiaries were almost three times as likely to have received dental care in the previous 12 months as compared to low-income beneficiaries, 74 percent of whom reported receiving no dental care. Many high-income beneficiaries - even those with dental insurance - paid a sizable portion of their bills out of pocket.   The findings, published in the December issue ...

  The uninsured rates for children increased at nearly triple the rates in states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new report. After years of steady decline, the number of U.S. children without health insurance rose by 276,000 in 2017, according to a Georgetown University report released. While not a big jump statistically — the share of uninsured kids rose to 5 percent in 2017 from 4.7 percent a year earlier — it is still striking. The uninsured rate typically remains stable or drops during times of economic growth. In September, the U.S. unemployment rate hit its lowest level since 1969. “The nation is going backwards on insuring kids and it is likely to get worse,” said Joan Alker, co-author of the study and executive director of Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families. Alker and other child health advocates place the blame for this change on the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Cong...

Choosing the right type of life insurance can be confusing, but it’s also an important decision. Here are some guidelines that can help you narrow down your best life insurance options. Consider term life insurance if... You need life insurance for a specific period of time. Term life insurance enables you to match the length of the term policy to the length of the need. For example, if you have young children and want to ensure that there will be funds to pay for their college education, you might buy 20-year term life insurance. Or if you want the insurance to repay a debt that will be paid off in a specified time period, buy a term policy for that period. You need a large amount of life insurance, but have a limited budget. In general, this type of insurance pays only if you die during the term of the policy, so the rate per thousand of death benefit is lower than for permanent forms of life insurance. If you are still alive at the end of the term, coverage...

Caregivers aren’t supported, and America overlooks their importance.  Last year, one of my best friends learned he had cancer.  In many respects he was lucky. He had great insurance. He had enough money. Partly because one of his friends (me) is well connected in the health care system, he got excellent care. So this is not a story about how the system failed, or how people need insurance or access. He had those. He got the care. This is the United States health care system at its peak performance. But I was utterly floored by how hard it all was. Americans spend so much time debating so many aspects of health care, including insurance and access. Almost none of that covers the actual impossibility and hardship faced by the many millions of friends and family members who are caregivers. It’s hugely disrupting and expensive. There’s no system for it. It’s a gaping hole. My friend, Jim Fleischer, missed a few days of work as the diagnosi...

If someone we love has a physical ailment, we can list a variety of places for them to seek care: a clinician’s office, a pharmacy, an urgent care clinic, a school health clinic, an emergency department — the list goes on. And, in every case, we would feel confident the clinicians in those places would know how to handle the case — or at least know where to send the patient if they need more intensive or specialized care. But, sadly, the same isn’t true for a loved one with a mental health or substance misuse need, even thought mental health problems are more prevalent than many physical conditions. As deaths of despair from drug or alcohol misuse or suicide continue to rise, we need a comprehensive, coordinated “no wrong door” approach that fully integrates mental health into the health care system and beyond. We need to transform our clinical practice, creating more options for care and putting mental health and substance use patients’ best interests first. Po...

  Republicans are promising that they care about pre-existing conditions. But you if you have a pre-existing condition, you should be freaking out. As a practicing physician for going on nearly 50 years now, I often feel like that auto insurance company that says “We know a thing or two because we have seen a thing or two.” After years of dealing with people who are insured, people who are uninsured and health insurance companies, I know that having real, comprehensive coverage can mean the difference between life and death. A few years back, one Republican Congressman – speaking about the impact of GOP legislation that would have drastically cut Medicard- defend the plan he supported by stating,  “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” That false assurance has been widely debunked  by people who actually report on health reform or work in healthcare. But that hasn’t stopped critics of the Affordable Care Act from continuing to promise “Re...