Typical cost of health insurance?

@John_D

Replying to myself...  😆

I'm going through a bit of a budget review and seeing if there are opportunties to do a little trimming.

For my wife and I, between our Medicare Part B and Medigap (almost $600 a month) in the US, and Unimed (Flex) here in Recife ($500 a month, current exchange rate), it feels like a lot to spend on insurance.  So was just doing a sanity check.

After the original post, I read through some related posts, and I'm getting the sense that this is not out of line.  It's just a big piece of the pie though.

04/16/26 Hi, @John_D.  Rough order of magnitude, R$1255/mo. each seems reasonable if maybe a little on the high side, with the coparticipação thrown in. 

As I've noted elsewhere, local reputation is important because a brand that's high quality in one part of the country may not be somewhere else.  Our members in Paraíba seem to be pretty satisfied with Unimed, so I imagine that they're well thought-of in Pernambuco, too; if so, you're good there.  Coverage in the places where you want to go is important, too, and Unimed probably meets that requirement, too.

In my mid-70s, I'm paying R$1299/mo. to Hapvida (no coparticipação, though); that's in Amazonas, where a lot of prices are a little higher than elsewhere in Brazil.  When we signed up with them in 2018, I was paying R$849/mo.  Once you're over 60, ANS only allows private health plans the annual approved rate increase to cover actual costs with no adder based on age, and regulates the increase in the coparticipação, too.  So you should be looking at a similar rate of increase in the future, excluding effect of the rate reduction that we got because of reduced elective services during the covid pandemic -- we don't want to repeat that again.