Blue Shield CA Offers Customers Freedom Of Choice

2008-10-06 09:57:31

( Insurance )



Blue Shield CA is a nonprofit Blue Cross Blue Shield Association member. It is the second largest not-for-profit health care company operating in the state.

Blue Shield CA offers Blue Shield health insurance and medical insurance packages to its members. These insurance packages extend to health maintenance organizations, preferred provider organizations, dental, and supplemental Medicare. You can also buy executive medical plans, vision insurance, life insurance, and short-term health plans through Blue Shield California.

You may have noted that Blue Shield CA has begun to establish tiered hospital benefits for its customers. This tiering scheme is part of its program to maintain a broad network of participating hospitals while offering a reasonable incentive for you and other consumers to use lower-cost providers.

Tiering results in different cost-sharing schemes between you and Blue Shield CA, depending on the hospital that provides the service. Tiering normally will not apply to emergency admissions and may depend upon where routine and specialty services are offered.

Blue Shield CA tiers hospitals according to region, teaching status and certain quality performance criteria, and then designs coverage benefits that operate within the groupings. You will observe that Blue Shield CA has classified and assigned hospitals to a specific tier, called a choice tier; however, if the hospital's prices exceed the average price for their region or that of other hospitals with the same teaching status, Blue Shield CA assigns the particular hospital to an affiliate tier.

Blue Shield CA tiers the different services covered by its plans, such as inpatient and outpatient services, surgery centers, radiation and chemotherapy services.

By doing this, Blue Shield California has given you the freedom to choose among community and teaching hospitals for the health service you want done. You also have the option of the copayment scheme that you will follow for a particular health service occurrence.


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