Health Care Services Corp. is No. 6 on Insure.com’s Best Health Insurance Companies list, scoring well in a number of categories in our health insurance customer survey, including price/affordability. It earned 4.01 stars out of 5.
Elizabeth Rivelli is a freelance writer who covers various insurance topics. Her areas of expertise are life insurance, car insurance, property insurance and health insurance. Elizabeth’s byline has appeared in dozens of online publications, including Investopedia, CNET and Bankrate. She has also written for several insurance carriers.
John is the editorial director for CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and Insure.com. Before joining QuinStreet, John was a deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal and had been an editor and reporter at a number of other media outlets where he covered insurance, personal finance, and technology.
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Health Care Services Corp. is a good health insurance provider overall. In our study of the best health insurance companies, HCSC ranked No. 6, with an overall star rating of 4.01 out of 5.
The company ranked highly for prices/affordability and for low deductibles, which is ideal if you visit the doctor frequently. With a low deductible plan, you’ll pay less out-of-pocket for your medical care. However, low-deductible plans tend to have higher premiums.
HCSC also stands out for its good policy offerings. In our survey of health insurance plan members, 78% of members said they were happy with the policies that HCSC offers and 87% said they would recommend HCSC to other shoppers.
HSCS was also one of only three insurers to have an A+ rating from AM Best, an indication of its financial stability. In addition, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), which rates plans on criteria like quality of care and patient experience, gave HCSC a score of 3.3 out of 5 stars.
AM Best's Financial Strength Rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's financial strength and ability to meet its ongoing insurance policy and contract obligations.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. It’s based on third-party metrics and an in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
We gave HCSC an overall price/affordability score of 4.04 out of 5 points. Only three other health insurance companies we reviewed earned higher scores in this category. Because of that, you might consider HCSC if you’re looking for a low-cost health insurance plan. Kaiser Permanente led this category.
Below is a look at how HCSC’s rates in New Mexico (using rates for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Mexico, a division of HCSC.) compare with Molina and UnitedHealthcare. These are 2024 healthcare exchange rates for a single, 40-year-old male in excellent health with an annual income of $70,000.
HCSC didn’t do as well as some other insurers in this category. Based on our evaluation of HCSC, we gave the company 3.96 out of a possible 5 stars. Kaiser Permanente led this category.
Our study showed that 78% of customers are happy with HCSC’s policy offerings. This score is better than the average rating for all insurers we reviewed and it indicates that the company offers a good selection of plan types. However, a few of HCSC’s competitors had more impressive scores, such as BCBS of Michigan, which led this category, and Horizon.
The majority of HCSC customers would recommend the company to other health insurance shoppers. According to the findings of our study, 87% of members said they would suggest HCSC to people looking for a new health insurance company. A few insurers did better in this category, including BCBS of Michigan, which topped this list. All BCBS of Michigan customers who responded to our survey said they would tell others about the company.
Almost seven out of 10 survey respondents said they trust HCSC. Several insurers did better, including Kaiser Permanente, which earned the highest trustworthiness rating in our study.
Eighty-four percent of customers say they plan to renew their policy for another year. However, this score is lower than some other companies we looked at. For many of the companies we reviewed, more than 90% of their members said they planned to stick with their insurer. BCBS of Michigan and Highmark led this category.
Just 18% of survey respondents said they were satisfied with HCSC’s digital experience, which includes its website and mobile app. But it should be noted that none of the companies in our ranking scored highly here.
One of the biggest selling points of HCSC is that the company offers plans with low deductibles. The insurer was in a three-way tie with Aetna and Cigna at the top of this category, with 31% of each company’s customers giving it a good grade. This was a category in which none of the companies we ranked had a really strong showing.
Our survey findings showed that 22% of respondents were happy with HCSC’s provider network. That’s about average compared to other insurers we reviewed – none of the companies we looked at did particularly well in this category. Molina led this category.
When shopping for a health insurance plan, it’s important to consider the provider network. The network is a group of doctors and medical facilities that offer discounted medical services to plan members. When you visit a doctor or hospital that is out-of-network, you pay more out-of-pocket.
The origin of Health Care Services Corp. dates back to 1929 when Justin Ford Kimball, a vice president at the Baylor University School of Medicine, created the first model for affordable health insurance.
During the Great Depression, several hospital officials, doctors, and civic leaders in Chicago adopted Kimball’s health insurance model and launched the Chicago Plan for Hospital Care in 1936. The organization’s first health insurance policy was issued in 1937. Over the following decades, the organization grew and was later renamed Hospital Service Corporation.
In 1975, the Blue Cross Plan for hospital services and the Blue Shield Plan for physician services merged and began operating under the name Health Care Service Corp. Several smaller Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in Illinois merged with the organization and eventually, Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Montana joined HCSC.
Today, HCSC is the biggest customer-owned health insurance provider in the country. The company insures more than 18.6 million people in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
Sources:
NAIC. “Health Care Serv Corp National Complaint Index Report” Accessed February 2024.
HCSC. “Overview.” Accessed February 2024.
HCSC. “History.” Accessed February 2024.
Insure.com in the fall of 2023 surveyed more than 1,750 insurance consumers (1,433 people with health insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR.
Respondents were asked to name their insurer and then grade it in a number of categories, including ease of service and policy offerings. The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
In addition, the editors also created star rankings for each company. Respondents were asked to pick their insurer’s top three attributes out of the more than the dozen they were presented – including categories such as customer satisfaction and price/affordability. The number of responses for each of those attributes was totaled and then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create the star ranking.
Respondents were also asked if they would recommend their insurer to someone else and if they planned to renew their policies. The percentage who said yes is presented in the results.
They also were given the statement “I trust my insurance company” and asked if they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement. The percentage of those who said they agreed or strongly agreed is presented in the results.
The editors compiled the survey results and then selected – based on the number of survey responses – the top companies for further evaluation. Insure.com needed 30 or more of a health insurer’s customers to respond to the survey for a company to be included in the ranking.
They then collected AM Best financial stability ratings and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) ratings, which evaluate health plans on, among other things, member satisfaction.
With the help of Prof. David Marlett, Ph.D., managing director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University, the editors created a rating system to determine which insurance companies were best in each sector. For health insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company:
Each insurer was awarded from 1 to 5 stars. No insurer in our star ranking received less than 1 star and the highest possible ranking is 5 stars.
On company review pages, the editors compared the profiled insurers in various categories against the leaders in that category or against other top insurers that match up well against the profiled company in terms of size and/or coverage area.