Do you have American healthcare? Do you pay for a gym membership? Perhaps you can pay less and get more!
After deciding to get back into the gym after a long hiatus, I was shopping around my area and trying to decide between Crunch or LA Fitness, each for about $40/mo, plus steep initiation fees and annual fees. Searching for a way to get a discounted rate, I stumbled across One Pass Select, offered by my health insurer, United Healthcare. While I was fully prepared to dunk on United, because of how often Dr. Glaucomflecken does, this particular member benefit turned out to be pretty great.
One Pass Select essentially functions as a gym aggregator, offering multiple memberships for one flat rate. So rather than paying Crunch or LA Fitness $40/mo and being subjected to their terms/conditions, I pay One Pass Select $36/mo and get access to:
- Crunch
- LA Fitness
- Anytime Fitness
- Workout Anytime
And a handful of other gyms I haven't signed up for, because they're not convenient to me. Four gym memberships for $36/mo is pretty cool. Plus if I ever want to cancel, I just cancel my One Pass Select membership from their website, instead of having to sacrifice a squirrel on the 8th day of the sabbath under a blood moon while chanting gregorian monk (the level of difficulty it felt like the last time I wanted to cancel a gym membership).
A quick Google indicates that other insurers offer similar programs:
- UHC has One Pass Select
- Cigna/BCBS/Kaiser have Active&Fit Direct
- BCBS also has Fitness Your Way
- Aetna has GlobalFit
This was a great find for me, that I'd never even heard of before. Sharing it to hopefully benefit someone else, as well!
This is very cool! Kaiser in California has one pass select. Unfortunately the gym I want access to is a climbing gym, and they don’t seem to support them. But they did have a way to nominate new gyms, so maybe I’ll give that a go.
I was thinking the same thing as I read the post: “cool! but I bet they don’t have any/many climbing gyms…”
I made a support request and they got back to me pretty quick. They need a bit more info about the gyms I want to add (I wanted to include it, but for some reason every website wants to limit the number of characters in support requests). I’m going to ask if being a climbing gym is any sort of deal breaker. If not, maybe we can get them added! Even if I have to buy a higher tier, it would still probably be less than my climbing gym membership.
I didn't look in to climbing gyms, but a higher tier than my $36/mo does include some of the barre studios that my wife used to go to
My health insurance doesn’t cover a gym membership but my employer does. They use a program called FitOn that gives you like $50 to spend on whatever health related things you want (massages, sauna, gym, etc).
I’m assuming it’s because we are self-insured and BCBS just manages things, so we don’t get all the BCBS extras. So for my employer to pay for a gym membership that will prevent me from having a heart attack that will cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills is a sound investment.
Similarly my company gives a benefit for Wellhub, I think it formerly was called GymPass or something. I pay for the 100$ tier because NYC lol but I can go to a bunch of gyms!
Unfortunately Kaiser in my region only offers a discounted rate on ClassPass, which gives you access to classes instead of gyms. It’s more expensive for less access.
I’m very happy with my Planet Fitness Black Card membership. It lets me go to any PF location in the world and perhaps more importantly they have a “spa” which features hydro massage beds, massage chairs, red light therapy, and even tanning (which I will never use). The massage really helps with my recovery and has become an instrumental part of my routine.
I get all of that for $25 a month and cancelling is just a matter of telling the people at the front desk that I want to cancel. They have a bad reputation online but in my experience the gym is fairly nice and most of the complaints don’t seem to carry water. All of my complaints are fairly minor and for the most of them revolve around some annoying members, which every gym will have.
BCBS for me offers a weird gym membership thing that's super expensive for "premium" gyms I would never go to and at the cheaper levels doesn't cover any useful gym locally. (Iirc it didn't cover anything in my city, maybe one, and the premium one was a smaller city over.)
It's also marketed around the same sorts of weight loss shit that I have never been less interested in, right up there with my insurance company calling to ask me if I wanted them to recommend to my doctor that I take a statin.
I'm sure this is actually useful in larger metro areas or on the coasts or something. But it also did the "free first month costs kick in on month 2" thing that feels as scummy as any gym. It seemed to be contracted through BCBS so they're only as good as that company.