Open Season Has Started; Health Care Secrets?
CHETRY: Good morning, Los Angeles. Beautiful shot this morning, where it's 65 degrees right now -- only going up a couple of degrees in L.A. partly cloudy today, going up to 67. Welcome back to the Most News in the Morning. Stephanie Elam is minding your business this morning, and she has more on -- it's called open enrollment right now for a lot of people that are getting their insurance.</s>STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Open season.</s>CHETRY: Some are calling it open season because everyone's going to be paying more for health care.</s>ELAM: A lot of people got the -- these packets that come in the mail and have nice, happy colors on them and they look all accessible, and people open them up, and they realize there's a lot more pain than they're looking at here. And it's true for so many people. Here's the thing that you can basically expect. You're going to be paying more. When you figure out what you need to do for your health insurance this year, plan on paying more. You are going to have higher out-of-pocket costs for one thing. That's definitely going to go up. The aging population is part of the issue here. More technology being used in health care and the government is also shifting costs. So that's part of the issue. Co-pays are now going to become co-insurance. And the idea basically is you're paying a percentage of the expense instead of that $20, $25 co-pay. That means you're going to be paying more for that as well, You're talking about maybe the health insurer paying 20 - or 80 percent and you're paying 20 percent, something along that lines. Also expect fewer options. You are going to have less options as far as HMO's, you may even have to change your doctors to stay in your health plan. That's another big issue for a lot of people. And you're going to find incentives to stay healthy. Maybe if you join a plan to stop smoking, you join some sort of plan to lose weight. These things are encouraged by the employers and also for the insurers because of the fact that a healthy employee costs everyone less. So they want people to do that. And so you may get gift cards and the like. But the other interesting thing, they want to know who your dependents are. Because if you have a dependent who really -- like a spouse, could have insurance someplace else, they'll tack on extra charges for that too.</s>ROBERTS: Really, that's interesting.</s>ELAM: Yes. There's a lot of little things in there, you got to read it all, and don't miss your window. Make sure you take care of that.</s>ROBERTS: Yea because if you miss your window...</s>ELAM: You're just out of luck.</s>ROBERTS: You got to pay attention to that because we're in open season -- I mean, open enrollment too.</s>ELAM: Yea, open season -- get out your guns.</s>ROBERTS: Stephanie Elam, thanks so much, "Minding Your Business" this morning. So how did this bizarre story out of Louisiana an interracial couple comes before the justice of the peace and says, I want to get married. And he said, nope, not going to do it, don't believe in interracial marriages. We'll talk to the two of them, coming up right after this, 26 minutes after the hour.