Jackie wants to help her pregnant OFS Leah, who's expecting twins in March. John Jonas recommends checking which insurers local hospitals accept, comparing private plans on MariaHealth.ph (roughly $150–$1,000 yearly), and making sure Leah's SSS and PhilHealth payments are current so she qualifies for maternity benefits and hospital coverage.
Questions this video answers
MariaHealth.ph
About $150 per year
About $1,000 per year
Two and a half months of salary pay (maternity cash benefit)
At least three paid SSS contributions (payments)
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 109. My OFS is pregnant. What can I do for her? So after another podcast episode about benefits, I got this email from Jackie. Here's what Jackie says. Hey there. I went back and rediscovered this podcast because I want to offer my OFS healthcare. She is expecting twins in March next year, and I would like to provide her with the best but most affordable good value that there is out there. I don't have a big agency, so it will be a very large commitment for me. But Leah has been exceptional in the time we've worked together. So thank you so much, Jackie. I sent this to Jamie, one of my ofs, and got a response from her. So here's what, here's what she says about it. So, number one, it depends on where Leah lives and what doctors and hospitals she has access to. So what Jackie should do is go to Leah, since Leah's the one that's going to be benefiting from this. Leah needs to do a bunch of work on this. So Leah should, number one, go to the hospital that she wants to go to or the doctors administrator, or the administrators that she wants to go to and ask them what health insurance do they currently take. Then Leah can go to MariaHealth ph. So Maria Health is a separate company. They're a private company that kind of aggregates health insurance around the Philippines. And you can go to MariaHealth PH and search for health insurance providers that will fit your needs and your budget. Maria Health also has a guide to help your OFS kind of figure out, kind of navigate the health care system and figure out what's going to be best for them. And then regarding costs, we found, like, the lowest plan is about $150 a year, but we're not sure it covers maternity. It's kind of not clear. And then you can go up to like $1,000 a year as a maximum of like, oh, here's a really, really great insurance plan. So let me talk about this specific case with Jackie and Leah. So Leah is close to delivering, and so there's not a ton of time. And sometimes health insurance can take weeks or months to process and it may not kick in in time. What the best option for both Jackie and Leah to do is make sure that Leah is caught up on her SSS and her PhilHealth payments. So SSS covers maternity benefit, which is two and a half months of salary pay if she has paid if she's has currently paid at least three payments. PhilHealth covers both the hospitalization for the mother and for the baby. If the OFS has paid at least nine payments and you can pay both SSS and philhealth kind of late, where you can catch up on your payments for the year by signing up for it and making all your payments right now so that you're current before you have the baby. So being current with SSS and PhilHealth really is a good option to help someone with maternity, where SSS will pay their maternity leave for two and a half months of salary, philhealth will pay their hospitalization costs, and then likely your OFS is going to come back to work pretty quickly to work for you so that you will continue to pay. And then they're double dipping for the SSS payments and then your salary payments, which is really great for them to help them get ahead with all all of the expenses that come with a new baby.
