Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Does everyone know that their own insurance, seemingly so good, is in fact just exactly like walking on a frozen pond that has plenty of thin ice? You usually won't fall into the icy water on most steps (years), and might be lucky for a very long time, but...
“When a person is diagnosed with an expensive condition such as cancer, some insurance companies review his/her initial health status questionnaire,” the HHS said in a posting at HealthReform.Gov. In most states, insurance companies can retroactively cancel individuals' policies if any condition was not disclosed when the policy was obtained, "even if the medical condition is unrelated, and even if the person was not aware of the condition at the time.” -- Daily Dose Blog (8/11)
Such as having a policy canceled during breast cancer because you didn't report acne.
If you think you're safe because you have group-coverage from your employer, think again.
Because...what if you aren't with that employer in a year or two? For any reason.
You can have your individual-market insurance canceled for unrelated, innocent mistakes in your application, which are almost or entirely impossible to avoid -- provide every detail of every kind of every health care visit and test result and medication for the last 10 years. Wait...there's more...
You won't be told you must report even things you don't know about, such as when your doctor didn't mention them to you.
These hidden practices give insurers huge advantages -- they can then find excuses to cancel policies if someone is desperately ill and the medical costs are large, and thus increase profits.
Most medical claims costs go to care for high-cost patients. So canceling just some of those patients greatly increases profits.
Therefore the insurer doesn't even verify the application information at the beginning, since that would lose the advantage of being able to cancel on this pretext later!
------
No comments:
Post a Comment