Will Buying Insurance from other Companies Help us get More Affordable Health Insurance

So the Republicans have successfully put the kibosh on the health care plan. Not that they don't have any ideas of their own; whatever health care plan comes to pass, it is sure to have a lot of Republican inputs to it. One of their important suggestions in the whole debacle, is the idea that Americans should be able to buy affordable health insurance across states. Right now, the situation is that you can only buy insurance from an operator who is registered in your own state.

Actually, that is a particularly significant piece of Republican sentiment in the matter. The Democrats are actually taking the Republicans up on this idea, and you can fully expect that whatever health care bill passes, this should be a part of it. Actually, you heard a lot of this when Senator McCain was stumping for his presidency in 2008. Everyone now feels that turning the entire country into the single health insurance market, will only make things more competitive for the insurance companies, and bring prices down. If you live in Colorado, and you suddenly find that a small health insurance company in Pennsylvania is making an offer that your local corporations just cannot match. You could easily buy across state lines.

And they have a point. If your state government has no control over most of the insurance providers in your state, the government just can't exercise of its consumer protection laws anymore. The companies will just say, "Oh!, We're from out of state, so nice try". Actually, in effect, people could end up paying more expensive premiums. Affordable health insurance actually looks much more shaky under this plan, Not to mention more expensive. So how would this actually work?

The states will have to form new principles of how to control companies operating there from outside. They will just have to bring out new legislation to this effect. And they would also need to license their own insurance corporations, to deal outside of the state. Alternatively, the federal office that governs the healthcare issues of federal employees, could deal with out-of-state insurers. In fact, the federal government could apply a single law to all of them, and prohibitsthem from offering anything less than a high level of care.

But the thing is, more choice does not always mean cheaper costs. What if it just results in customers choosing the policies with the lowest price tag, and opting for the lowest cover? For most poor families, getting the lowest possible amount of cover could seem to be a really attractive option sometimes, until the day they fall ill. And what happens if there is a dispute? There are hundreds of thousands of disputes every year involving health insurance companies that deny claims for perfectly valid treatment options. If there is a dispute, subscribers may find themselves having to travel across state lines each year. Affordable health insurance, doesn't come from an excess of competition. It comes with a reasonable amount of time, and proactive government legislation.

Are you Pregnant or are you an Athlete? With Blue Shield Health Insurance, Texas, you can Forget Individual Cover

If you get your health insurance coverage at work, like 60% of America does, you'll find it hard to truly appreciate how terrifying it is, when like what 10% of America is going through now, your health insurance provider raises its rates by nearly half, like they are doing California and Maine. If President Obama's new health care plan does come through, it won't make that much of a difference to those with workplace coverage. The 15% or so in America that has no cover of any kind - their lives will change forever. That puts the figure at about a quarter of the entire population of the nation, of people who either pay out of their own pockets or just do without. Health care reform would be wonderful for these people; and not an inconsiderable number they are too. But really, how bad is it dealing with a health insurance company of your own, and not going through the company you work for? The Blue Shield health insurance companies of Texas, Florida and California have their individual insurance policies published online, and if you read them, you would know.

Here's an interesting statistic; BlueCross Blue Shield of Texas is the biggest player in that state. And also, Texas is the state where there are the most people who have no insurance whatsoever - a full quarter of the population. Let's say that you get by on doing freelance landscaping jobs around your town in Texas. You want to get your individual insurance, and you sit down with an agent who represents Blue Shield health insurance. The first thing he does is, check you through a list of more than 100 health conditions that will disqualify you from getting any kind of care if you answer in the positive. If you are pregnant right then, you can forget it. If you have had an organ transplant or Addison's disease, or have had some kind of minor stroke, the agent will just get up and leave. And if you happen to be a little overweight, they will still accept you, but at a big jump up in the premiums.

In patriotic Texas, a war veteran who has had an amputation suffered fighting a war, can right away be refused any kind of health care policy with Blue Shield health insurance. You can however get something at higher rates, if you only had a partial amputation. At least this makes some kind of crazy sense; but why would they deny you anything if you have acne, or varicose veins? And oh, don't forget that if you happen to be a minor or an athlete or an oil driller working offshore, you had better keep walking. This is the craziest policy anyone ever saw - why would they deny someone in the fine physical shape of an athlete, health insurance cover?

So basically, Blue Shield health insurance only wants to offer you health insurance if you have practically no disease whatsoever, and don't work on a job that might one day give you something. It certainly makes a lot of business sense for them, but it doesn't make any business sense for the customer. With President Obama's healthcare reform, denials like this would be illegal; and yet no Texas Republican, supports it. But things are coming to a head now. All these health insurance companies are raising their rates through the roof, and there may be no option but to accept reform.

The End of Affordable Individual Health Insurance, as we Know It

The changes are harly trivial. Health insurance policyholders in a handful of states across the country have been receiving notifications from their insurance companies that they can expect to pay perhaps 15% more on their policies, for the same service. One health insurance company in Maine, Anthem Blue Cross is jacking up its rates nearly 23%, and is getting a lot of hate mail from local representatives and customers. That's not as bad as what they did in California - the sunny state saw nearly twice that kind of escalation. And in Oregon, people got hit with a 25% hike last year, and can expect something like that this year too. All this happens mainly to people who buy their own personal policies, instead of going through the companies they work for. Bulk purchasers, like employers, see some kind of reason prevail. If insurance companies are not reasonable, the employer will walk with his hundreds of potential customers. All of this could be an incidental effect of how the insurance companies lost thousands of customers over the past year - customers who could no longer afford cover, now that they don't have jobs. Affordable individual health insurance is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Right away, people can expect to be paying a third more on individual policies, says the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. If this gets your back up and gets you planning the vitriol you'll pour down in your letter to your Congressman, you're out of luck. The government doesn't really have enough power, dictating prices. But there certainly is going to be plenty of table pounding at state legislatures. It's not that the health insurance companies don't see how difficult they are making it for families to get access to healthcare. For a family of three, that works out to something like $1300 a month. In several states, consumer protection groups our putting together major protest rallies; and they should. Once access to affordable individual health insurance is taken away, where does that leave us? And since the insurance companies understand the situation from our point of view, they do support President Obama's health care reform, now hopelessly stalled. They want some kind of system that can help everyone in the country be covered too. If lots of people drop out of the system like they are doing now, the companies have no choice but to spread their losses among other existing customers.

Still, the government in Maine, rejected some of the health insurance companies rate increases; after negotiations, they brought it down to 11% or so. And the health insurance companies are suing the state. The company argues that they aren't doing this for some kind of obscene profit. They claim that they can barely stay above water as it is. In Kansas too, insurance companies are raising their rates by a third. Mostly, the governments are falling in line behind these demands. They do agree that the cost of taking care of people is rising, and one can't expect these companies to not pass on those costs to the customer. Basically, anything between 10% and 25% is what we need to expect. Just one more effect of the recession.

An Affordable Health Insurance Plan Might Be Coming Soon

As a freelance writer, I did not have access to health insurance for many years unless I was willing to buy it myself. I was willing to do so, but the problem was that nobody would sell me any health insurance at a reasonable price.

I had been trying for years to find an affordable health insurance plan, but I was turned down almost immediately because I am considered to be overweight and I had high blood pressure for a brief period in my life. I had not had any issues with my blood pressure in years by the time that I was trying to get health insurance coverage, but that didn't matter.

I started to wonder why finding affordable health insurance was so difficult in a country as wealthy as the United States, where medical care is so abundant. I was tired of going to the doctor and having to pay three or four times as much as friends of mine that had health insurance coverage.

A few years ago, I developed an umbilical hernia, and that was the point that I realized I could forget about ever getting an affordable health insurance plan or any health insurance at all, for that matter, unless I decided to lie and tell an insurance company that I didn't have any pre-existing conditions. I do not believe in lying about anything, so it was hard for me not to become depressed.

It was shortly after that happened that I saw the movie "Sicko," which criticized the state of the health care industry in the United States by visiting with a number of families who had sick or injured loved ones that were not able to receive health insurance coverage. A few of the people even died because of a lack of insurance coverage.

Knowing that an affordable health insurance plan was laughable in the condition I was in, my feeling of depression started to change to anger. It was disgusting to me that people were dying so that these big corporations could make bigger profits.

Then came March 22, 2010, one of the most historic days of my lifetime, in which the health care bill was passed that will allow all Americans to have health insurance regardless of pre-existing conditions. The best part about it is that the coverage will be part of an affordable health insurance plan that I can get in the very near future.

There could be some hiccups with the new health bill, as there have been with most major pieces of legislation throughout the history of the United States. If I can find an affordable health insurance plan, however, I will feel so much better about my life.

Working an Impossible Medical Health Insurance System

Perhaps you've been thinking that to businesses across, the recession has been nothing but bad news. Trust them though to see a silver lining in anything. There is a lot of evidence to be had that employers across the country for years have looked for an excuse to trim the fat. The recession was the answer to their prayers: they picked the opportunity to cut jobs once and for all, jobs they intend never to replace. If you are like me or any of my friends, or if you ever saw the Michael Moore film Sicko about what it is like living in America without medical health insurance, you know how life lived like this, is skating on thin ice, or living on a tightrope, or any of several picturesque ways of saying that you are a step away from disaster all the time. When I turned 30, and turned single after a five-year marriage ended, I thought I would be quite able to take care of myself - I worked freelance, and I make about $3000 a month. My first stop was at the insurance brokers - I needed medical health insurance now that I was not on my former husband's plan anymore, and I was pretty sure I could swing it. It turned out that the cheapest full coverage they could find for me cost about $900 a month - almost a third of what I am able to make. And this is for a 30-year-old who is in great health, and works out the Y all the time.

In the end, I knew I couldn't afford it; I took the limited bare-bones medical health insurance plan that charged only $200 a month. If I need to visit the dentist, to get my eyes looked at her anything that's not catastrophically serious, I have to pay myself. When I got a bad sprain last month, I had to spend $300 on it myself. And I know that I'm lucky; if I had some kind of a pre-existing condition, I would probably have to do without food to be able to afford insurance. Why on earth is insurance getting so expensive? Even when you have employer- sponsored insurance, costs have jumped up about by $2000 a year. Let's look at the top reasons why medical insurance is turning so expensive these days.

1. America is all about the litigation; and doctors get a disproportionately large share of all that litigious energy people have. So if doctors find themselves in the witness box and asked to defend a treatment plan that went wrong, they want to show that they were extra careful, and that they ordered every test under the sun before they ordered any kind of treatment. All those expensive tests that they order for no reason just on the off chance that you might sue them, the insurance company has to pay for. And at the end, you have to pay for the insurance company's costs.

2. Medical health insurance is a bankrupt concept in America. It's bankrupt because just running the system takes about one dollar out of every three dollars you pay. That's 33% all costs for the American health insurance system - as opposed to say, 10% in neighboring Canada. It's expensive hiring so many people to staff the organization, printing every form in triplicate, hiring lawyers when you sue, and so on.

3. And then there are just ways in which health insurance companies are bloody-minded (that's what the new health bill is seeking to correct. For instance, insurance companies believe that if you are a woman, that they are justified in charging you may be 50% more for coverage. They argue that they have found that women are more likely to visit doctors, and get reproductive system and pregnancy-related medical needs more often. But if you think about it, men are far more likely after the age of 50 get heart attacks and the like. It's a good thing that the law is now on our side though. And how about the way doctors are paid for how much they prescribe you - the more drugs they prescribe, the more tests they give you, the more money they make. They don't get paid for results.

5. There is less and less competition in the market for health insurance companies. In half of all states in the nation, they have no more than two insurers per market

Here are a few ways in which you can get medical health insurance for less. You could for instance consider COBRA. If you work for a company for a number of years that was at least average-sized, you get to make use of your employer's insurance plan for a year and a half after you leave. When your insurance company denies you treatment because it feels that your treatment would be unnecessary, you shouldn't just shrug your shoulders and pay yourself. What you need is to sue the company for breach of trust. In half of all states in the country, there are just two insurers battling it out. At some point they do share their plans with each other more often, and decide to not lower their prices. Getting the right medical health insurance is all about knowing the system, and sometimes, negotiating. The company has some discretion in lowering prices to help win a customer. You just need to make sure that you take advantage of it.

The Unhappy Compromise in the Cheaper Health Insurance Plans

Is it possible that some health insurance plans can be bad for you? For certain kinds of insurance plan, especially the ones with high deductibles, that could actually be true. When insurance companies survey households with high deductible health insurance plans, they find out what you would expect - the fact that you are expected to spend out of your own pocket is enough to discourage lots of families from visiting the doctor for anything other than the most terrrible health problem. For instance, in a family with a high deductible plan, a child who falls down and scrapes his knee on something rusty is often not taken to the doctor for a tetanus shot. Instead, the mother washes the wound and puts on a Band-Aid - literally and figuratively. In families with modest incomes that use high deductible plans, trying to get by on temporary solutions to health problems is the way to manage out-of-control expenses. If they went in for every little thing, they would probably spend all they made on health.

Any doctor believes in how a stitch in time is able to head off having things worsening in the future with poor care right now. There are advocacy groups around the country, like Families USA for instance, who argue that this particular problem with high deductible health insurance plans is not the half of it. People love high deductible health plans because they charge you a smaller premium in return for your promise that you will pay yourself for any problem that costs less than a certain amount they determine - $1000, or so. What this means is, that unless you happen to be in a tragic health situation, you can consider yourself as having no health insurance. It won't kick in until your expenses spiral out of hand.

The savings can be significant too; for an entire family, it can cost no more than $6000 for the whole year. And you can also use it as a tax-sheltered savings account if you sign up for a plan that charges no more than $2500 in deductibles. The problem with this plan is that it is always used by people who have very little money. It was in fact, originally designed for people who have lots of money, but just don't want any bother with high insurance costs. It is for people who are confident that they can swing it on their own. But employers and others have since co-opted these health insurance plans for how cheap they are. And if you feel that it is good enough for the little cover it gives poor people against at least expensive health problems, that may or may not work; depending on what kind of loopholes your insurance provider has put into the deal.

The thing is, the health insurance companies aren't really there to help you - and if they charge a very low premium, it is not just because you take on a good part of the responsibility, agreeing to a high deductible. If your high deductible premium is really low, what you need to do is to watch out for other cost-cutting measure measures built into the plan. Some of them add up every single thing you charge to your health insurance plan, and say that over your lifetime, you cannot charge any more than a certain amount. They have a cap on how many times you can visit the doctor each year, and if you are admitted for hospitalization, they won't cover any of your expenses the first day - the day you're likely to have the most expensive charges. Using services like Ehealthinsurance though can be a great help looking closely into all kinds of plan details. Getting a good health insurance broker should work well too. And don't go about applying for health insurance at different companies left and right. Any time you're turned down by one company, the others will be able to share that information, and they will turn you down too.

Benefits of Reform Show up - Parents get Health Insurance for Children who are Grown-up

The new healthcare plan changes everything on how your health insurance deals ith your grown-up children; the law does say now that parents can keep children on their policies as long as they don't turn 26; but there are so many variables here that everyone's all mixed up about how it's going to play out come September when the new laws for this come into force. Let's look at some of the important questions might come up in learning how to extend your health insurance for children who've grown up.

Let's say that you have a child who's just graduated from college; he doesn't have a full-time job with benefits yet to be able to claim health insurance, and you don't feel it's safe to keep him uninsured until September when the law kicks in. What do you do? Now here's the thing - many of the major insurers, Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, Humana and many others are saying that they are going to do the right thing and get a head start on the new law. All new graduates are going to get on their parents' health insurance even before the law comes into force. Will it cost more to do so? In general, you'll just pay the same premiums you always have. If it is your employer who arranges for your provider, health insurance for children who are grown-upon your employer's plan will be an especially good idea since the employer will be subsidizing it.

No parent will need to get individual health insurance for children who are grown-up and recent graduates. If you have a plan that doesn't come into compliance until New Year's Day next year, those plans still allow you to include your grown-up children too. The reason it is legal for insurance companies to put off compliance with the new law is that, the law recognizes that most insurance companies work on a January-December schedule. So why are these health insurance majors voluntarily doing this nice thing? They know they will need to include your children soon anyway; and to hire thousands of full-time workers to take all the children off the list and then put them on again in six months isn't going to be cheap. And insuring those young adults will cost nothing, because young people don't fall sick anyway.

But what do you do if your insurer doesn't plan to fill the gap in this time? You can always use COBRA to include health insurance for children who are grown-up, until the new law comes into force. COBRA premiums can be quite expensive - perhaps $500 a month. If so, your graduates and can just get individual health insurance, and not be included in your plan. A healthy young husky can get a high deductible policy for no more than $150 a month. You could try a website like eHealth-insurance.com. The great thing about the new law is, that we get a taste of what health reform means so soon after the huge political row the world witnessed over it. And it could change a lot of minds into seeing how quickly a new law can change people's lives.