Should We Be on the Same Health Care Plan?

When an employer removes a health care plan option, it can leave an individual with fewer choices. But given a domestic relationship, there is another option of deciding to join the second individual's plan. But which is the better option - retaining separate plans, or being on the same plan? Instead of focusing on what was lost (the plan no longer available) it might be more productive to focus on options that are available - choosing a different plan offered by the employer, or having a shared plan.

In this notebook I also carefully walked through some terms that weren't clear to me, and generated plots and some basic thoughts about them. You might need to customize this for your use case, but hopefully it can be a programmatic start to figuring out your options.

• health insurance notebook

I hope that this notebook might be useful to others, or encourage employers to provide better tools to simulate anticipated costs under different scenarios. We put our life into our work, and I believe that this knowledge is a right.

Binder Hub is an option for rendering (and customizing) the notebook, but it doesn't usually work great for me. You can easily clone the repository here, and then start jupyter notebook (Python 3 kernel):

git clone https://github.com/researchapps/health-insurance-decision
cd health-insurance-decision
jupyter notebook