Pre-existing conditions make sense. You can’t insure them.
What makes no sense is that a person with one or more pre-existing conditions pays the same amount as a person with none. Why should you pay the same for less insurance?
Pre-existing conditions make sense. You can’t insure them.
What makes no sense is that a person with one or more pre-existing conditions pays the same amount as a person with none. Why should you pay the same for less insurance?
But the reality is if you don’t cover pre-existing conditions all those costs would end up on the taxpayer instead of being spread out among the healthier participants of each health insurance plan.
We aren’t going to let diabetics or any other chronic disease sufferer die in the streets in the US. In fact, letting them get insurance is probably the cheaper option. One low blood sugar coma leading to a trip to the ER easily costs more than a year of insulin.
I’m not thinking of the future as much as the past/present. As far as I know, no insurance company has ever charged less even though it covered less.
I’m just saying that there is evidence that there never was a real market.
I think they do charge differently for individual insurance. Of course, the cruel truth is you’d probably pay more for less coverage since the pre-existing conditions that they aren’t going to cover are held against you anyway and cause your rate to increase.
Group insurance is a whole ‘nother thing.
Mark,
My wife has had two kidney transplants, so we are very familiar with pre-existent conditions.
Insurance is simply about spreading risks, and the truth is that someone with a pre-existing condition may be statistically more likely to incur medical expenses that are not directly related to the pre-existing condition. I’m not sure if health insurers determine rates this way, but I know that this is how life insurers determine rates. With life insurance, it is simply about crunching numbers. People often think that the companies are passing value judgments – but they are just about making money. In fact, one of the things that actuaries look for is statistical anomalies that they can exploit. GEICO did this when they discovered that federal employees were less likely to have serious car accidents than the general population. GEICO doesn’t care why this is true, they simply chose to target federal employees with somewhat lower insurance rates knowing, that on average, they would have to make lower payouts for accidents. If people with pre-existing health conditions really incurred fewer medical expenses, it would surprise me that no company has tried to exploit this anomaly.
It is also quite possible that the amount of regulation in health insurance market has severely reduced competition and therefore hindered the market from working properly.
David