topic Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans? in Student Loans

Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 20:45:15 GMT

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Adkins — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 05:33:35 GMT

No, I wouldn't for a couple of reasons. First, the funds have been delegated to cover your insurance. Your company may/could demand repayment of the money since it wasn't used as intended. Secondly, you may only go to the doctor a few times a year but if you had a.major medical event, for example cancer, could you cover the cost of treatment out of pocket?

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 16:44:22 GMT

Are the student loans federal or private?
If they're federal I can help you to see if you can lower your payments. If it's private, there are a few lenders that have options available to lower your payments.
There might also be a way to set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for educational expenses (including student loans?). I'm not familiar with them but you could find out what options your company offers or if something like an IRA could be of benefit to you.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 15:50:14 GMT

Do not cancel medical insurance and continue to accept reimbursement. That is theft. Your company would be within their rights to fire you and sue you for back pay.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 18:21:16 GMT

Good advice! Thank you.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 18:22:29 GMT

The loans are Federal. My company offers nothing for educational expenses.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 18:35:54 GMT

Excellent points! Adulting is hard.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 20:02:50 GMT

Federal, that's great! There are many options.
The more details you can provide about your loans, the better ( current/ original balances, types, how long you've been paying on them, repayment plan, etc.).
There are several different Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans that may be able to lower your payments. REPAYE and Income-based repayment (IBR) tend to be the most popular. If you have a significant $ amount of loans, many people find loan forgiveness helpful. If you work in public service, this can often be reduced to 10 years (on a majority IDR plan). Or you can plan to pay off the loan in the long-run, but seek to just get your payments down for now.

To start, here is a helpful resource: repayment estimator. This will give you a rough estimate of what your monthly payments can be. If you sign in (it's the gov student loan website) it will fill in your loan information for you. Ignore the upper number in the range of payments throughout the loan if you don't get annual raises.

https://studentloans.gov/myDirectLoan/repaymentEstimator.action

Students are put on standard repayment by default, but it's rarely the plan most people can afford.
I looked it up and it seems you can only deduct funds from an IRA without penalty for current educational expenses. Sorry about that

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 23:08:38 GMT

HECK NO! Find another way to lower the costs.

Accidents, sudden illness, nobody is immune.

My personal story: Was married living my best life with my husband. He was healthy, played D1 college football but had to retire early due to knee problems, had a great paying job.. me..I played college volleyball and was in great shape. We traveled the world

In the SAME YEAR my husband got diagnosed with Leukemia and I had a heart attack and then a sudden cardiac death. No Risk Factors.
Now I've pretty much lost everything and we had insurance at the beginning.
Once we were sick enough to not be able to afford our insurance all hell broke lose.
Can you pay out of pocket $300k for a bone marrow transplant
19k for a 4 day hospital stay
18k for a ONE day stay
50k for 5 weeks in the ICU
No? Neither can I but thats my reality right now. If you need me to send those bills I can.
And to add insult to injury we spent our savings on my husbands treatments and he still died.
I have one foot in the grave myself with a barely functioning heart and there is very little help out there. All this transpired in ONE year. Did I think this could happen....nope...I'll never say never again.
So sorry for the dramatics but DO NOT GO without HEALTH insurance. I yelled for the people in the back to hear!!!

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 03:33:16 GMT

Deznelle,

I am so sorry you lost your husband, your savings, and your health. And in such a short period of time too! You've had a terrible year. I hope things start to look up for you. I agree that going without medical insurance can be devastating in many ways.

For the OP, I knew someone who went without health insurance due to cost, then had some ER visits for previously undetected health issues so they went on their spouse's insurance through work. During the waiting period before it kicked in, this person sustained an injury that required surgery, which took place...less than a week before their coverage would start. The surgery and hospital stay were over $70,000. Healthcare in the U.S. is extremely expensive. And since the money your job gives you is allocated for insurance reimbursement, spending it otherwise is fraudulent and not a good idea.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 14:44:29 GMT

Aduling is hard! I get the instinct. I'm sitting on $90k in student loans (I only took out $50k but being in deferment/forebearnace for nearly a decade really jacked that balance up) and even on the lowest payment plan, my payment is $400 and I chose a career field to take advantage of PSLF which of course everyone is being denied. I considered not taking insurance this year to help offset that cost because I, like you, don't go to the doctor very often and am generally young and healthy. For a moment it seemed like a risk, but one that would probably land in my favor. And then a few days before I was set to make that move, my doctor found a health issue that ended up taking dozens of appointments, countless expensive scans, and tens of thousands of dollars to resolve. Thankfully, my insurance covered most of it.

Moral of the story? It isn't worth the risk, even if your employer doesn't demand repayment. Health issues sneak up on you and you do not want to be caught without coverage.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 16:16:32 GMT

I'm glad you were able to recover from your health scare.
If you would like advice and tips on PSLF and its pitfalls, feel free to let us know here or in the student loan topic. Many of the mistakes that were made due to Dept of Education's lack of communication and servicers' lack of, well, decency, is now more easily identifiable. Good luck.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 02:35:40 GMT

Thanks, "luckily" I came into late and am only 1 year in so Ive seen where others have gone wrong and will hopefully head that off. But it's a hot mess so who knows what will come of it.

Re: Cancel Medical Insurance to repay Student Loans?

UncleB — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:20:08 GMT

The OP hasn't been back to the forums in months so this thread is now closed.

Feel free to start a new thread if you would like to continue the discussion.

--UB