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The US Health Insurance Market

A lot of people would rather not think about illness - it is natural. But in the United States in the twenty first century you really do need to think about what might happen if you or a member of your family happens to fall ill. If you do not have adequate insurance cover, or if you have no cover at all, you could be in deep trouble.

To get a handle on the problem we can look at the general idea of health insurance. For a start there are other ways to fund health. Take the Germans or the French - their system is known as insurance but it is not the same as ours. Your average German pays money into the scheme, but the resulting coverage applies to all his fellow nationals. The United Kingdom taxes according to income, but offers health treatment equally to all the Queen's subjects. This is not the model in the United States of America. Anyone with very limited cash coming in, and anyone past retirement age who doesn't have a better plan, is eligible for the healthcare basics. Those outside these categories are asked to insure themselves - the better your policy, the more you pay for it and the more services you are entitled to receive.

Just as you would insure your automobile or your house and contents, you insure your health. You take out the policy with a business, which means the schemes need to be profitable. It is the reason that currently existing medical complaints are really hard to get insured. From a purely business point of view, and strange though this sounds to some, a person has had heart trouble is not a good risk. It is like asking an insurance firm to cover you and your new sports car despite your string of driving convictions. For this reason above all, we must think about joining a HMO or sorting out a good policy while our health is excellent. If you need more persuasion, many HMO schemes do not immediately offer the full range of services to new joiners, so it is best to be well enough to not want them when you join.

Of course healthcare is not exactly like auto insurance: if someone is such a bad driver they cannot get insured they will have to stop driving... a genuine difficulty, but not the end of the world. On the other hand if someone is denied medical treatment it can mean the end for them. But the richest country on the planet can hardly stand by and watch someone die of a preventable illness. This is why there is Medicare and Medicaid as a safety-net. Besides this, most States have legislated that certain things must be in all healthcare insurance programs, even at the most basic level of coverage. An example of this is the mammogram for early detection of breast cancer - most schemes must include this service. So look at what is offered in your state.

The employed will normally have a company sponsored healthcare scheme. Problem is that the scheme often goes with the job, so a new job or the loss of the current job can mean that your family is no longer covered. Take time to understand your scheme; the inclusions, exclusions and all that. Work out a back-up plan to put in place if the scheme disappears. It's worth the time because at the end of the day our health is everything.

Copyright 2005 Jenna Milson. All rights reserved.

Jenna Milson is the author and developer of Flint Health Insurance which is a great place to start looking for health insurance related topics. Take a look at her archive of articles for further details: http://www.flinthealthinsurance.com/articles/


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