SmartMoney.com
Buying Private Health Insurance
By Stacey L. Bradford
One of the hardest things about leaving a job is walking away from the benefits package. Once you’re out on your own… you must cough up a lot of dough for what will feel like inferior health coverage.
Before you start your search, brace yourself. The private health-insurance market isn’t pretty. “It’s a difficult, difficult road to go down,” says Kathleen Stoll, Director of Health Policy for consumer-advocacy group Families USA.
Here’s what you have to look forward to: steep monthly premiums, higher co payments, outrageous deductibles and fewer benefits.
While there are some benefits you can live without, others are important. A maternity rider is one of them, advises Ellen Corwin, an individual health-insurance broker from West Des Moines, Iowa. “I advise all of my female clients to get one,” she says. Unlike employer-sponsored plans, which usually cover birthing expenses, private plans don’t unless you pay for it upfront. Even if you decide to start a family in a few years, it may be too late to add the coverage. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, for example, won’t let a woman add the benefit after she initially purchases a policy unless she submits an official “notification of change in status” and gets married.
http://www.smartmoney.com/consumer/index.cfm?story=20030929
Comment: According to advocates of consumer-driven health care, one of the benefits is that consumers save on health care costs by choosing to purchase only the coverage that they really need. But that requires either the ability to predict future health care needs, an impossibility, or the necessity of purchasing truly comprehensive coverage.
In the example given, the coverage decision is based on the acquisition of a marriage certificate. Everyone should have comprehensive coverage. Why do we leave health care decisions in the control of an industry that profits by making coverage decisions based on such ridiculous requirements as to how fresh the date is on a marriage certificate?
It really is time for us to establish our own universal, public program of health insurance.