Health Insurance: Is It Ever Friendly?
November 19th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Do you understand your health insurance coverage? That’s a loaded question, if ever I heard one. Insurance in general and health insurance specifically is usually one major point of confusion in nearly every one’s life. While it is impossible to understand fully every aspect of our individual policy it does help if we have a good overview.
So the first thing is to remember that every little aspect of your healthcare should not be covered by your health insurance. There are just some things that you can do much better and a whole lot cheaper than any large corporation. Some of us think that health insurance should cover more things especially the little things, but we would not expect our car insurance to cover the cost of changing the oil, now would we? Just ordinary run of the mill, day to day, headaches and upset stomachs are better taken care of by is instead of the insurance company.
can you imagine how expensive health insurance would be if every time you had a routine headache or upset stomach from eating too much that the insurance company had to cover the bill for aspirin and something to settle your stomach? I have not been in the hospital recently but I do remember that over 30 years ago I assault on an itemized list of charges where a hospital charge a patient $.75 for two aspirin. Can you imagine how high that cost is now? Now compare that to your cost for a bottle of 250 aspirin. See how much more cheaply you can take care of your routine and headaches?
In order to be comfortable with your health insurance it helps to have at least a basic understanding of what kind of insurance policy you bought or your employer is providing for you. For instance, if you have a traditional indemnity type insurance policy then you have the freedom to go to the doctor or hospital of your choice but in exchange for that freedom you have much more limited coverage. One the other hand, if you can live with HMO coverage and work with more restricted freedoms in exchange you do get a much wider range of routine day to day and if it’s.
Tip number three for getting the most out of our health insurance coverage is to remember that we have our own individual responsibility here. While we have every right to expect health insurance to cover the biggest part of cancer treatments and surgery if we develop lung cancer it would serve us well to remember, for instance, that smoking three packs of cigarettes per day is likely to lead to developing lung cancer.
You and I are not in a position where we can ignore the impact that are personal decisions have won the cost of health care. As a nice fringe benefit when we do things to lower our impact on the cost of health care we also improve the quality of our life now as well as 10 and 20 years down the road.
It is also relevant to know that health insurance is much more complex than it needs to be because policy provisions vary not only from company to company but also from state to state. Each state’s legislator’s make their own decisions on what kind of coverage each policy issued in their state must provide and sometimes these are coverage’s that the overwhelming majority of citizens will never benefit from but you have to pay the increased cost anyway.
While this makes it impossible to explain to everyone exactly what their coverage is even from state to state it does help if you have at least an overview of what kind of coverage is available to you as an American consumer. Sometimes just having a better over all picture of the health insurance options helps us to lower our own individual cost of health insurance year-to-year.
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Understand your policy healthcare insurance. Using laymen’s terms that anyone can understand. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.
