Our company group plan is coming up for renewal and they have offered to extended it for another year with a slightly higher premium. It is "grandmothered" (their term) and has slightly different benefits than a standard ACA plan. We are thinking of not renewing and dropping our company group plan and instead switching over to a BCBS individual/family plan. (We are the only two employees in our group plan.)

Trying to figure out the variations in premiums, deductibles, co-insurance and maximum out of pocket is a little confusing. So, we made a spreadsheet to do some basic comparisons. It appears we are paying "silver" prices for a "bronze" plan.

The spreadsheet considers two cases. The first case is if one of us requires a major medical treatment. The second considers only treatments under the deductible. It is a basic calculation that does not take into account prescription benefits (which our current plan does not have) or co-pays (which our current plan does not require nor do any of the BCBS plans we looked at).

This helped us figure out the best value for maximum annual out of pocket considering premiums and the other factors. The individual/family plan we are considering is slightly less than our current group plan and has more benefits.

Surprisingly, higher deductibles and co-insurance don't make much difference in the bottom line annual cost, and paying higher premiums for lower deductible/co-insurance might not make sense. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Anyway, below is a link to an "anonymized" version of the spreadsheet (Excel XLSX format) that you can download. It has simple comparisons of a few BCBS plans that show the effect of variations in deductibles, co-insurance, etc.

The out of network and other info is for comparison only and not used in the calculations, which are based only on premiums (for two people), individual deductible, co-insurance and individual max out of pocket for one person.

To customize it for your situation, go to www.bcbst.com, select "shop for plans," select "shop BCBS plans," enter your particulars (no real name required, just date of birth, gender, and tobacco use), pick some plans, and enter the details for premium, deductible, co-insurance and out of pocket in the corresponding spreadsheet columns.

Note: because the ACA enrollment period had ended you will have to declare one of the qualifying events. Ours was "loss of minimum essential coverage" (i.e. dropping our group plan).

I'd appreciate any feedback regarding whether we are looking at this logically (or if there are any errors in our calculations or assumptions).

health_insurance_compare.xlsx