The Benefits Check is free. And nobody pays us.

What we are paid nothing for

No commission exists for any of these. Government benefits do not pay finder’s fees to anybody, so this is not restraint on our part — there is simply no money in it, and there never will be.

• Medi-Cal
• CalFresh
• Medicare Savings Programs
• Extra Help (Part D Low-Income Subsidy)
• IHSS
• SSI and SSP
• County and community programs

That covers the UniHealth Benefits Check itself, reading your paperwork, telling you what you qualify for, and helping you apply. If you use UniHealth only for this and never speak to us again, we earn nothing, and that is a perfectly good outcome.

What about Medicare plans?

UniHealth does not sell Medicare plans and no insurance company pays it anything. The plan pages here are Medicare’s own published data, shown so you can see what is available and what it would cost you. To enroll in any of them, contact Medicare.gov, call 1-800-MEDICARE, or ask for HICAP, the county’s free counseling program.

Three things follow from that, and you can check each one without taking our word for it.

1. No insurance company pays us anything.Not for showing you a plan, not for the order they appear in, not for anything you do on this site. There is no arrangement with any carrier behind what you see here.
2. What a plan pays is not a detail the UniHealth Benefits Check ever receives.There is no commission or payout field anywhere in the request the Benefits Check sends. The full list of what it does accept is published, and you can read it.
3. Nothing is chosen for you.The Benefits Check puts plans in an order and shows the reason for each. Staying exactly where you are is always one of the answers, and we have nothing riding on which one you pick.

Why we cannot profit by steering you

There is no plan we make anything from, so there is no plan we have a reason to push toward you. Nothing about which plan you pick changes anything for us.

The ordering is built to match, and you can read the rules it follows:

1. Every plan is placed in one coverage path from the eligibility screen before it is compared.
2. Only plans the person can enroll in are ranked: D-SNPs need Medi-Cal, C-SNPs need the matching condition, I-SNPs need an institutional level of care.
3. Inside a path, plans with every requested medicine listed and every requested clinician confirmed rank first; plans whose directory or formulary is not loaded stay visible with that gap named.
4. Then ranking uses the published monthly premium (net of Extra Help when the screen shows it), the in-network out-of-pocket maximum or Part D deductible, and the overall star rating.
5. Nothing here is a recommendation or enrollment; hospital networks, prior authorization and expected annual spending are not assessed.

What a plan pays is not one of the details the Benefits Check receives, so it cannot affect that order even by accident. See what the Benefits Check does and does not accept

Free, unbiased help that is not us

HICAP is the county’s Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program. Its counselors are trained and registered by the state, they do not sell insurance, and they are paid no commission by anyone. If you want a second opinion on anything we show you — including on us — they are the right call, and it is free.

We put this here on purpose. An agency that will not tell you about the free alternative is telling you something.