3 ways to not waste your health insurance

As the year winds down, it's time to assess your health insurance. Make sure you have taken advantage of all of the benefits your health insurance provides, and take some time to analyze what sort of coverage you'll need for next year.

Here's what to do:

Work your deductible

If you've already met your deductible for 2014, schedule elective office visits, tests, and procedures before the end of the year. If you wait until January, your deductible will have reset and you'll be paying a lot more out of pocket for the same services.

Use up your flexible spending account

You have to spend the money by the end of the year, or lose it. (Employers have the option of either allowing you to carry over up to $500 into the next year or granting a grace period of up to two and a half months to use up your previous year's balance. But not all do that.) If your FSA still has money in it, get busy spending it on qualified medical expenses, such as eyeglasses and contact lenses, or out-of-pocket payments made to doctors. If you still can't spend down the account, put less aside next year.

If you buy insurance on your own, re-enroll by Dec. 15

If you bought health insurance through a state marketplace, your plan is going to expire on Dec. 31. If you take no action, you'll be automatically re-enrolled in your old plan, or, if your plan is not being offered in 2015, into a plan of the insurance company's choice. And your tax credit premium subsidy, if you got one, will be the same as it was in 2014.

But because of how the formula used to calculate tax credits works, if you default to auto-enrollment, you could end up either spending more on health insurance than you need to in 2015, or getting a tax credit that's too high, some or all of which you may have to pay back eventually.

So log back in now to your marketplace account, update your income information and shop for coverage the same way you did last year.  Be sure to get this done by Dec. 15, which is the latest you can enroll if you want your plan to start Jan. 1.