Hi Ah-San,
This is Diana. I just saw your post on WXC. I can't post on it so I'm just going to write this to you.
The first year the baby has 6 routine checkups - 1wk, 1m, 3m, 6m, 9m, 12m. Each checkup costs about $200-$250, but you can probably bargain it down to ~$170. So for a healthy baby, you're looking at about $1200 for the checkups.
Generally you'll want to buy an insurance with a high deductible and low premium, but make sure there's a coinsurance part that caps the maximum out of pocket expenses for the year. I have a Lumenos plan with Intel and this is how it works:
- I pay the first $2400 of expenses for the year (that's the deductible)
- After that, the plan pays 90% of expenses until I paid $4500 total
- $4500 is the maximum out of pocket for the year. After that, the plan pays for 100% of expenses.
- For this plan, I pay no premium.
So, for my healthy baby, I only paid $1200 for the year total. Compare to a plan that charges $300 a month but no deductible - that's $3600 just for the premium and I'll only use $1200.
Take your examples, if you pay $970/m and $500 deductible, that means you'll pay $960*12 + $500 = $12K a year. For the other plan for $350/m and $5000 deductible, you'll pay $350 * 12 + $1200 = $5400. That's clearly a better plan. But make sure the plans have a maximum out of pocket that you can live with.
Diana