Get Acquainted with HMOs and Maxicare in this Season of “Outbreaks”

Are you familiar with what HMOs are? Healthcare Maintenance Organization or HMOs are organizations that provides or arranges managed care for individuals or employers at a fixed fee / premium or prepaid contract. For the entirety of my “employed” life, I think I always had a health card from an HMO provider.  

The best provider that I encountered so far (I think I have experienced 2-3 providers) was Maxicare. This was the HMO that my dad dealt with to give health cards to the employees of the family business. 

I wanted to get a health card when I resigned from my corporate job last 2012. so the first thing that came to mind was to get from Maxicare. I heard from my friends and family that Maxicare’s services were expensive. This perception of the product stopped me from researching about it, and since I started becoming busy with my business, getting an HMO card became least of my priorities.

My family then would get occasional colds and cough, nothing that worrisome though. So I continued living like this, comforted by the fact that no grave disease or serious illness will fall upon any of us in the family. I also thought that I would always have enough, so I could just pay for any hospitalization or medicines that we would eventually need.

In 2018, Zeeka, my daughter had her first episode of benign febrile convulsions. For kids who are younger than 7, our pedia mentioned that they are prone to have convulsions when their fever reaches 38 degrees celsius. The child will then have convulsions and will have to be monitored constantly until temperature drops. Zeeka was confined for 7 days twice that year. Since we didn’t have HMO, we had to pay Php 75,000 for 7 days of confinement. We had to dip into our savings and these health issues really hit our finances hard.

I started scouting for a Healthcare Maintenance Organization or HMO that I can trust. During my research, I came across the brand that I was initially curious about, Maxicare, and went to the Maxicare Philippines website.

When I checked out their products, I was surprised to see a plethora of products and services that would suit one’s needs. And hey, it wasn’t that expensive at all. 

For those considering which HMO to go with, here are the top three things that made me decide to go with Maxicare Philippines!

I want to go with an established HMO!

Do you really want to worry about service when you’re sick and rushing to the ER? With Maxicare, they have 30 years of solid healthcare expertise. With this, I’m assuming that in terms of service and internal processes (haha! I sound so nerdy here!), they’ve encountered all kinds or concerns and inquiries from their members. They have more than 1000 accredited clinics and hospitals and they have more than 56000 doctors and specialists nationwide (more than 18000 warm bodies). 

I want to go with an HMO that really understands my needs!

If you go through their products and services, they have full HMO products and they have prepaid products that suit your needs! I really just wanted to enumerat these here but I will try to explain them in succeeding posts.

Full HMO / Full Risk Products

• My Maxicare: For individuals and Families
• Maxicare Starter Plan: For Businesses with 3 to 99 employees (Best for start-ups like Taxumo!)
• Maxicare Plus: For Businesses with 10 to 99 employees

Prepaid Products

• My Maxicare LITE: A prepaid health card which provides one-time Confinement coverage for eight (8) identified illnesses (Including Dengue!)
• Maxicare EReady: A prepaid health card which provides a one-time coverage for Emergency related cases
• Maxicare PRIMA: Maxicare has what they call Primary Care Centers (PCC) and PRIMA offers unlimited Outpatient Consultations, and availment of laboratory and diagnostic procedures in these PCCs.

I want to go with a company who innovates!

Yup, this is actually important for me. I want to know my balance or whatever credits I have availed from my plan. With Maxicare, they have a member gateway that contains the member info, the availments, emergency contact, Online Letter of Authority or LOA Request (print online; available for 3 days after printing), etc. You’ll also see that Maxicare always tries to improve their products and services.

So that’s it… these are the things that made me avail of Maxicare’s services. I’ll be writing more blog posts and posting more information on social media about Maxicare and its products and services, since health and “outbreaks” have been constantly talked about.

Feel free to comment on the section below for anything that you want to know!

*Full Disclosure: We were impressed with what Maxicare offers! Hubby and I decided to become agents! If you need help deciphering which of these you need, you can comment below and I can get back to you. You can also message me on my Facebook page. 🙂

For prepaid cards, head over to the Maxicare store: https://shop.maxicare.com.ph/ Please type gingerarboleda as your agent 🙂 Thank you!