Aflac and Retirement – Road to Retirement
While retirees cannot sign up for Aflac once they officially retire, anyone who had Aflac before retiring can carry their membership into retirement and enjoy the same benefits at the same price. But should retirees keep paying for Aflac? We plan to break it down in this article.
Plan Differences
Each Aflac plan offers different benefits and might be more or less useful for members. For example, the accident plan covers accidental injuries that might occur while working, exercising, or just randomly. These accidents can be something like a concussion, burns, or even fractures. Aflac pays you based on the type of injury and what kind of treatment you get. The critical illness plan covers you if you receive a life threatening diagnosis, these are things like cancer, strokes, or kidney failure. But did you know that the critical illness plan also covers you if you need an organ transplant or if you have a heart attack? Finally, there’s the hospital plan, which covers you if you are ever admitted into the hospital or if you even just go to the doctor. This plan also offers additional payments for prescriptions, surgeries and major diagnostic exams, like EEGs, CT scans, or MRIs.
Another important distinction is that Aflac’s critical illness and accident plans both have a “wellness” benefit. This benefit is an annual $50 payout for simply getting routine medical tests. You can get this payout from all sorts of different tests, we recommend you check out this article to learn more: https://www.sdpeba.org/news/city/everything-you-could-possibly-want-to-know-about-aflacs/.
And finally, both the critical illness plan and the hospital plan offer payouts for mammograms. The payouts vary, but by having both plans you could get up $300 for getting one test annually.
Since the plans are so different, there’s a good chance you might want to enroll in one but not the others based on your lifestyle. In this next section we’re going to break down the three plans and what lifestyle’s they fit best.
Is it Worth Keeping the Accident Plan?
The accident plan is great because it offers wellness coverage and will help you out if you fall and get a fracture or a concussion. This plan is best for people who want to still remain active into retirement, are worried about accidental injuries or will make the most out of that wellness benefit.
Since most retirees are on a fixed income, you’ll need to take a closer look at the plan’s cost and figure out how effective it might be for you. This is one of our more cost-effective plans, so it is able to be fit into most budgets.
If you’re not planning to be too physically active in retirement and are not too worried about anything that the plan covers, then it’s probably safe to skip.
Is it Worth Keeping the Critical Illness Plan?
Since this plan covers cancer, renal failure, heart attacks, and strokes, all of which are most common in older individuals, this plan might immediately seem like the best plans for retirees. And while that might be the case, there are some reasons why you might want to skip it.
If your family has a history of renal failure, strokes, cancer (or if you spent time around carcinogens), this is definitely a plan to consider. Since this plan pays you for just getting an annual exam, as well as an annual mammograms, you can easily offset the cost of its premiums.
If you don’t think you’ll utilize the wellness benefit, and you’re not too worried about the diagnoses we just went over, then you can definitely skip this plan. We recommend you check back through what it covers though, as there are many important benefits to consider especially since a lot of the illnesses covered by this plan are most commonly found in older adults.
Additionally, if you had cancer in the past this only covers cancer diagnosis if you’ve been cancer free for 12 months and you were proven to be in full remission by medical tests.
Is it Worth Keeping the Hospital Plan?
The hospital plan is probably the easiest recommendation for retirees. While it doesn’t have a wellness component (besides the $100 mammogram benefit) to help offset the cost, you receive a pretty sizeable payout for being admitted to the hospital. If you stay for more time (up to 31 days) you can even receive $100-$200 per day.
This plan also offers a payment for going to the doctor. You can get six payouts of $25-50 a year by going to the doctor and filing a claim. And you can get up to $100 a year after being prescribed medicine.
This plan is definitely worth looking into before retiring. Just be sure to check the price ahead of time and to make sure you’re filing claims whenever you qualify!
How do I sign up?
Again, this plan is only available to active City and County employees. In order to take it into retirement, you must have this plan prior to retiring.
Enrollment for Aflac plans is available during OE this Fall. During Open Enrollment be on the lookout for our guide that will contain step by step instructions to get your enrolled as painless as possible!