Should I drop Primary Insurance?

after we'd filed our intent to put the kids on our private pay insurance, a friend of mine (who is an attorney) said never do that--jobs change, circumstances change and you can't always guarantee that you'll have your private pay insurance. she's adopted twice from foster care. it works for her. I've wondered too. our problem is finding anyone who takes Medicaid here. if there was only private insurance, no problem. mention Medicaid and they start backing up. it took months to find a dentist for our fks--and we only have 2 months to get them to the dentist on intake! If you live in an area where there's no shortage of providers, it might be worth it. for us? not.

In my state we already have a form of "universal health insurance" (OR) and the kids' get this as part of their adoption subsidy agreement. The cw's told us to keep our primary insurance and have the state insurance as secondary. However, when I called the state to do this they said we could not do it. (I think I spoke with an uninformed/misinformed worker, though, because with the adoption subsidy they DO do that, but I didn't find that out until later.) Anyway, so we did not put them on our primary but kept them on the state insurance. It covers at 100%, so.... It CAN be difficult to find providers at times, and some options are not available unless we pay out of pocket, but for MOST things it has done well. So for us we didn't do primary because it was turning out to be more involved than it would have been worth.

We use our private insurance as primary and medicaid as secondary. (Or did until my dh became unemployed last month) Ideally, I'd like all medicaid providers, but I can't get that for everything. Our p-doc does take it, but she's awesome so I don't mind the co-pays. His psych is at the local Children's Hospital so she's fully covered by medicaid. It just depends on what we are looking for.I don't every recommend someone drop their private insurance when they have medicaid. Life happens and it's nice to know my son's very expensive psych drugs are covered even though we're uninsured at the moment.

We are seriously thinking of dropping our primary and just keeping Medicaid. Between the premiums and HIGH out of pocket maximums it would save us up to $15,000 per year. I'm thinking that I could do quite a bit of little side things with that kind of money.

We have adoption subsidy for 3 kids and we had put them on our primary insurance with state health insurance as backup. Our primary insurance changed and ended up being Cigna. Cigna is horrible. We could not get services for our eldest who has needed many hospitalizations. Finally we just dropped Cigna but just for her. The other two kids are still on Cigna primary but now Cigna is refusing to pay for any more therapy sessions for our child on the spectrum despite it being against state law to deny those services.

Thank you all for your feedback. After several phone calls & continued problems of finding my daughter a Psych doc, I ended up dropping Cigna. As a matter of fact, even Medicaid suggested I just drop Cigna. So, we shall see how it goes. We are in a metro area & have plenty of physicians to choose from.