Many of the drugs that are prescribed by your Doctor come in Generic form as well. Buying the Generic brand can save you alot of money.

Generic drugs are widely misunderstood. Many people believe that generics are not as potent or effective as the brand name drug. The truth is that the vast majority of generics are useful medicines and have the exact same ingredients as the brand drug that it copies. The only difference is the price and how the pills look.  Generics are much less expensive and by law they are not allowed to look like the brands that they copy. 

The following pharmacies offer low-cost generic brands for about $4.00 a month for a 30 day supply.

• Walmart
• Target
• K-Mart
• Safeway
• Walgreens
• Kroger
• Costco

Be sure to check with your Doctor if the Generic form is right for you.

I think it's time that you know the truth. Most people don't like or trust insurance companies and when it comes to insurance quoting Websites, people are finding out that in many cases you can't trust them either. If you have ever shopped for insurance on the Web I'm sure you've seen their ads: "Click here to get competitive insurance quotes." These sites are really lead generation sites designed for helpless, starving agents.

So here's how it works: you're searching online to find insurance quotes. You see the ad at the top of the page offering you "low-competitive quotes" and you click on it. Then you are taken to a page that requires you to fill in all of your personal information in order to process your quote. After the time consuming process of filling out their lengthy form, you hit "submit" only to receive the following message, "Thank you for your request, an agent or representative will contact you shortly." What's just happened here is that you have given all of your personal information to a lead generation company that will in an instant, sell your information to 4, 5 or even 10 insurance agents.

Lead generation is big business. Insurance agents for the most part are too dumb or too lazy to figure out how to generate new business for themselves, so they leave it to the "pros" to do it for them. The insurance industry has been plagued since the beginning with a sales process that guarantees most agents will fail. The statistics are startling. Only 2 out of every 10 agents that join the insurance business, stay in the business. The rest fail and move on to other things. To make matters worse, most agents that stay in the business, struggle financially and really can't make it work. Thus, the insurance lead generation process was born. It wasn't created by genius insurance executives. It was created by smart, entrepreneurial business people that figured out insurance agents will pay just about any price to obtain a lead.

The Insurance lead generation business has taken off. If you've fallen prey to these lead generation sites, your personal information is flying around the Internet at lightning speeds into hungry insurance agents email boxes. These insurance agents will then call, hound and beg you to let them come over and sell you some insurance. Sometimes 4 or 5 agents will call and in some cases you might have 10 or more agents chasing you down at the same time. What a nightmare!

At our firm, HealthplansNY we don't operate this way. We will never sell your personal information. We process it so we can provide you with the best insurance product that you are looking for at the best price that we can find for you. We are an independent insurance agency that has figured out a long time ago that we do not have to "trick" people into doing business with us.

With all the bad news about the high cost of health care that we've been hearing about lately, some good news has recently been announced by GHI (Group Health Incorporated). GHI has held price increases "in check" for 2008 and has announced for the 3rd quarter of 2008 they will actually be DECREASING their rates for many of their plans by 2%! I know it doesn't sound like much of a break with the continuous price increases that we have become a custom to, but a price decrease is refreshing news.

Oxford has also kept their pricing flat with no increases so far this year and in the beginning of 2008 Blue Cross/Blue Shield rolled out 2 "rocking" health care plans (Prism 1 & 2) for businesses that were very reasonably priced but extremely "rich" in benefits. Maybe we are seeing a new trend in the health care industry where prices do not only go up, they also come down? We'll keep you posted.