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.