Buying Health Insurance on Your Own
posted by admin in Home Health Services
Most people who try to buy health insurance on their own
find that they either can’t get it or can’t afford it, even if they are
relatively healthy, a yearlong investigation by Consumer Reports
shows.
Of the roughly one in seven people surveyed who had no health insurance, 76%
said they could not afford to buy it.
Only about 7% of those surveyed had purchased health insurance on their own,
and 71% of these people were unhappy with their policies.
More than half cited high premium costs as a major reason for their
dissatisfaction, and 45% said economic considerations had caused them to
postpone needed medical care.
The report appears in the January issue of Consumer Reports, the
publication of the nonprofit advocacy group Consumers Union.
“People who don’t have access to employer-provided health insurance are
at an extreme disadvantage,” Consumer Reports Health Editor Nancy
Metcalf tells WebMD. “We learned that private insurance is virtually out of
the question for most uninsured Americans. This is a market that is completely
dysfunctional from beginning to end.”
The High Cost of Good Health
Cumming, Ga., real estate agent Maggie Frazier is all too familiar with the
problem.
Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 1988, Frazier tells WebMD that
she was virtually crippled by the disease until powerful drugs became available
to treat it.
“I was to the point where I couldn’t even comb my own hair,” she
says. “That is how aggressive my rheumatoid arthritis was.”
She now takes injections of the immune-system suppressing drug Enbrel, at a
cost of $1,400 to $1,700 a month.
Her employer-provided health insurance picks up most of the tab, but Frazier
is about to lose this coverage because the plan is being terminated. Most
private health insurers she has contacted wouldn’t cover her. The few that
offered her insurance wanted to exclude her arthritis medications and any
health problems she might develop related to her rheumatoid arthritis.
At age 60, Frazier now faces the economically ruinous prospect of paying for
the drug out of pocket. She is also considering coming off the drug and going
on full disability when her symptoms return.
“As long as I am on the Enbrel I am perfectly healthy. Most of my
clients don’t even know I have rheumatoid arthritis,” she says. “But
I’ve had the discussion with my doctor about what will happen if I have to stop
taking it.”
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