There are so many options today when it comes to buying affordable health insurance and it is not easy to know exactly what you should be looking for. However, if you adopt a systematic approach to finding the best plan it does not have to be quite so confusing.

The first thing you must do is to identify precisely what your requirements are. For example, are you looking to buy cover for just yourself or do you need a plan to cover yourself and your spouse, yourself as a single parent with one child or your whole family? That one is fairly easy to answer but things then start to get a bit trickier. For instance, just what are your medical requirements? Are the individuals who are to be covered by the policy fit and well or do any of them have pre-existing medical conditions that will need to be taken into consideration? Does anyone to be insured have special medical needs or will they need to be under the care of medical specialists or treated in specific medical facilities?

Next, if you are in a position to take out cover through a group scheme like that provided by an employer, you will have to know the options which are available to you under the scheme. Here your options will be restricted to those that are provided under the group plan and these may or may not meet your needs. If the scheme does not meet your needs, or you find that you are ineligible for cover under a group plan, then you will need to turn your attention to individual plans such as a managed care plan or a traditional indemnity plan.

An indemnity plan is designed to provide care for an accident or illness and provides you with considerable freedom in deciding where and by whom you wish to be treated. Of course, this freedom comes at a price with usually high out-of-pocket expenses, but you may well believe that this is a price well worth paying for the flexibility provided by an indemnity plan.

A managed care plan focuses far more on keeping you healthy in the first place and provides cover for things like routine doctor's visits and preventative care. Managed care plans are however much more restrictive than indemnity plans and would require you to seek care through a nominated doctor and in treatment centers that are approved by your insurer. Here cost tend to be lower and, provided you are not especially worried about who treats you or where that treatment is carried out, then this might be a good option.

One point worth noting here is that there are now quite a few variations of the managed care model including HMOs, PPOs and POSs, each of which provides more or less flexibility when it comes to seeking treatment.

Having made a decision about the particular type of plan that best meets your needs the last thing you have to do is to select an insurer. Without some personal experience of the insurance companies then a good place to start is with your own friends and family who already have health insurance and who can talk about their own experience with their insurers. Failing this, then another very good place to start your search for information about specific health insurers is the Internet. You will also discover that obtaining an individual health insurance quote online is an extremely quick and easy process.