Comments on: Pre-Existing Conditions a Serious Issue For Health Insurance

By: Jeff Whitley

Jeff Whitley — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:18:12 +0000

Great article. It’s understandable why insurance companies would need to charge a certain amount from a person with a health condition. It is however unfortunate that they decline that person coverage due to this condition. Why not put a rider on said condition for anything related to it?

By: Louise

Louise — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:53:24 +0000

Rick – you make a good point, in that the health insurance companies have to cover costs as well as make a profit. But with the current high risk pools that states have, everyone on the plan is an expensive policy holder. There aren’t any healthy members, so the premiums have to be high and the benefits have to be minimal in order to make ends meet. The idea I’m looking at is to spread the load over a much wider group. So for the person with a $10,000 pre-existing condition, the health insurance company just needs to get that $10,000 in additional premiums from all the plan members combined, rather than just from the sick person. It would raise premiums for people currently on medically underwritten individual plans, but the options would be expanded for people with pre-existing conditions, and their premiums would decrease. So it’s more in keeping with the overall “fairness” aspect of insurance.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:40:15 +0000

From the perspective of a health insurance company, if an applicant has a health condition that costs $10,000 per year to treat. The insurance company needs to charge that person atleast that much extra on top of what they charge to assume the risk of covering other conditions that could happen. I think individual health insurance companies are only allowed to give a rate-up of a certain percent.
So that’s why a plan through an employer, or a risk pool like Cover Colorado is so expensive. There is such a high percentage of people with expensive health conditions and the insurance companies are required to treat them from day one (if they’ve had continuous coverage) and they also need to make a profit.

By: forHealth

forHealth — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:17:36 +0000

If the object of the game is to distribute the risk among a group you would think the insurance companies would try to increase the size of their groups. The assumption is that the larger the group, the lower the risk, the lower the premium cost for members, and the higher the profits for the insurer. It makes no sense when the insurers run afoul of logic and are steadily decreasing the membership of their group policies by over pricing them (making them unaffordable) even to the lowest or healthiest members.