Microsoft Health Care in Seattle
I am planning to move to US. New to their health care system. Given that I'll be working for Microsoft at Seattle, how do you rate their (FTE) Health Care benefits compared with rest of the companies in Seattle?
Where are you moving from? There are two choices: Premera and Kaiser. Conceptually they work very differently. With premera you chose your doctors and will have to copay a part of your expenses up to the deductible (I believe 2k). But MSFT puts an equivalent money for you on a HSA account every year. So technically you pay almost zero. With Kaiser you are part of a network. They are both the insurer and the provider. Which means you can only chose from the doctors they offer. But you rarely see an invoice. Copayment is 20$ per normal visit and 40$ per specialist. We had our baby with them and all the pregnancy check ups and so costed us near 0$. It is more of a health care system like we know in Europe. The thing is that if you want to visit a particular dermatologist or specialist with Kaiser you won’t be able to do that... Overall I think Microsoft has the better benefits of all. We even declined coverage from Amazon to keep both of us on MSFT insurance. And I know couples from NVDIA+MSFT who also stick to the MSFT plan. Nevertheless it is a bit an “illusion of choice”. We found that at the end of the day all child deliveries happened at the Swedish hospital no mater which insurance you had.
It is not true that all child delivery happen at Swedish. With premera you can also go to Evergreen or Overlake.
True. Premera has more options. But we know people with Aetna, Premera, Kaiser and others who all ended up to had their babies at Swedish. Just as an illustration point. Also sorry I was referring to Seattle not Eastside. In fact that is a good point, maybe Kaiser does not work so well on the East side, they seem to have less facilities there. So you should check also depending where you live.
Microsoft hsa plan is the best
Ditto. I remember the time when there were no deductibles but even today MS plan is the best, period.
Is msft plan better than Google and Facebook?
Why does it matter whose is "better" the hsa plan my msft is super fantastic. Cost us about 1500 out of pocket to have a baby... And that "out of pocket" came from the pre tax hsa that msft contributes to
Its pretty standard .. not so great as they do high deductible.. no free health care
It may be a high deductible; however, there are zero payroll premiums for the employee and all covered dependents.