Plan your way to health: New tool helps employees better navigate open enrollment

NEW YORK -- It's that time of year again. Halloween? Yes. But also for that other haunted house full of unknown and unexpected surprises -- open enrollment. Time to choose benefits for the coming year and hope you make the right choice, else your financial and physical health suffer a death of a thousand cuts.

Copayments? Coinsurance? Deductibles? In-network providers? Major medical? Dental and vision care? Flexible spending accounts? It used to be so simple -- pick the plan that includes your doctor or has the most convenient facilities, and move on.

Now, it's a bigger decision. Just like retirement savings, employers are putting more of the health care burden on us. They have to or they couldn't stay in business, they say.

The result: you have to make more -- and more expensive -- choices about which health care plan to go with. And you quickly find yourself in a world of medical and financial "newsspeak" you hardly have the time and patience for. See Vital Signs for more on the high stakes of 2008 choices.

What to do? Where can you get a 15-minute explanation of flexible spending accounts, for instance?

Financial doctor in the house

I was alerted to the latest release of a tool that's been around a while but has had a big update this year. It's called "Plan For Your Health" (www.planforyourhealth.com). OK, no surprise that someone has cooked up such a site, especially involving an insurer.

Plan For Your Health is a joint "public education" project of health insurer Aetna and the Financial Planning Association that aims to give medical and financial guidance in terms we can understand, with the help of joint creators Dr. Charles Cutler and certified financial planner Tracey Baker. Visit the site.

The site has numerous features -- and offers. Among them:

• Life-stage advice. Click on a tab; career, marriage, family, living single or retirement to get specific advice and tools geared to your group.
• Selection and calculation tools. According to Aetna spokeswoman Betsy Sell there are 13 tools in all to help make the right care and financial choices. Examples include a "health benefits priorities" tool and a "baby expense calculator."
• Glossaries. Glossaries can be kind of dull, but this one really helps to explain difficult terms in plain English.
• FAQs. Again, helpful, simple answers in plain English.
• "Navigating Your Health Benefits for Dummies." Beyond the Web-based tools, publisher Wiley joins the fray with a short but helpful 62-page version in their "Dummies" series format. You can order the book for free from the site, regardless of whether you're an Aetna customer. Co-authored by Cutler and Baker, it's a nice little package.

In plain English -- and Spanish too

OK, Plan For Your Health may live up to its promise to walk you though health coverage in plain English. But here's a big plus, especially for the 35 million of you in the U.S. using Spanish as a primary language: most of the materials, including the "Dummies" guide, are available in Spanish.

I can only feel for those of you trying to decipher your way through American health care in a second language.
For the rest of us, perfectly competent in English but not in the language and financial nuances of health care -- this site is worth at least a 15-minute check. If nothing else, I'd at least order the free book.

In this haunted house, it's like turning on the lights.