Health Insurance 101 -- yet again

I just cannot understand why it is so difficult to get people to grasp what seems to me a simple idea. Let ' s try one more time.The purpose of insurance is to spread risk. That ' s the essence of the concept. Health insurance (or health care insurance as some prefer to say) is different from other kinds of insurance in some ways, so let ' s just talk about health insurance.Health care costs are unpredictable. It is true that there are risk factors associated with some conditions, most notably smoking tobacco. Nevertheless, no matter how healthful your lifestyle, you still just might need expensive health care. You might be hit by a bus. You might get breast cancer, or multiple sclerosis, or Type 1 diabetes or some other autoimmune disease. Most lung cancer is associated with smoking but some people who have never smoked get lung cancer. Your son might develop a substance use disorder, no matter how regularly your family attends church and how fervently you pray. It happens.So-called Health Sharing Ministries are not insurance. They are unregulated and they do not guarantee payment. What is more, they explicitly cap annual and lifetime costs at a fairly low level. That ' s why they are cheap!* Yes, they are also cheap because they enroll only people who are healthy and don ' t need expensive health care, and they explicitly exclude certain risk behaviors. But even if you scrupulously obey your religious prohibition against tobacco and having unprotected sex with various peopl...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs