Saturday, December 12, 2009

How to choose an affordable health insurance plan

In trying to find an affordable health insurance plan for you and your family, you need to have an idea of some of the essentials of good health since the more healthy you are the less medical expenses, these are:

1. Personal habits
2. Nutrition
3. Environmental factors
4. Inheritance:  a family history of these problems, and then
5. A quality and affordable health insurance program


1. Personal habits: Your habits can either make you or ground you to a halt. Take for instance, A stick of cigarette increases your likelihood that you will get sick and also reduces you ability to comeback from ill health. It also increases your health insurance cost because health insurance industry will carry out detail examination of your health condition before coming up will a plan. Smoking still remains one of the leading cause of preventable death. Smoking affects your entire health (body, mind and soul)

Cigarette smoking causes more death than any other preventable disease in the US. Smoking increases the risk of many health problems, such as:

1. Cancer of the lung, the mouth, cervix, and bladder (most people who have lung cancer are smokers or     people who live with smokers)
2. heart disease
3. stroke
4. ulcers
5. hip fractures
6. Tobacco Smoke may Cause Behavioral Problems in Children
7. Serious Nicotine Dependence
8. Exposure Include Breast Cancer
9. Smoking can make sleep problems worse.
10. Smokers also tend to get colds and other respiratory infections more often.
11. Smoking affects pregnant women and their unborn children
   
The more cigarettes you smoke each day, the greater your risk of disease, non-smokers who are exposed to cigarette smoke are also at risk.
Other habits that may impact on you health insurance expenses may include heavy alcohol intake that put you at risk of not being able to control you actions.

2. Nutrition: We are what we eat. so if your regular meal are junk meal what kind of body do you think you have? Strong and healthy body, hmm

It is expected that our daily nutrition must be balanced with protein, carbohydrate, vitamins and mineral. So the more balanced you daily nutrition the less likely you will fall ill

3. Environmental factors: The kind of environment you live in will determine how costly your health insurance expenses will be. Take for instance a highly polluted densely populated city will demand higher premium rate than one with a low pollutant to oxygen ratio. Life expectancy is low in such environment. A country with frequent occurrences of natural disasters like cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruption, flood, etc. will attract more premium to service health insurance plan. Economy and government policies have a roll to play in how much an individual will have to pay for health insurance costCompare Us and Canadian health insurance policies.

4. Inheritance: Disease resulting from the effect of having defective genes. These diseases are inherited because genetic material is accurately copied before being passed onto the offspring from a parent. However, they can also arise as a result of a sudden change in the DNA known as a mutation. Common examples of inherited diseases in humans are cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anaemia, polydactyly, and Huntingdon's disease. Anyone with this condition will have to live with it, however it will increase health insurance cost significantly. Such a person must be discipline and must avoid risky behavior to avoid complicating the problem.

5. A quality and affordable health insurance program: When you decide you didn't like your current health insurance plan and desire to make a change.Of course you will need to examine already existing plans to pick from. Sometimes you could buy plan that is insufficient for your needs and that have component parts that is close, crowded state or arrangement with varying loopholes and technicalities. A popular health insurance term, for instance, is to sell plans that don't cover any pre-existing conditions.

If I had to choose the most important aspect of health restructuring, it wouldn't be the public plan. Nor would it be the individual mandate, or the employer mandate, or the employer tax exclusion, or the Medicare expansion. it would be the Health Insurance Exchange.

This idea goes by a lot of different names. Massachusetts has a variant called the Connector. Ted Kennedy's bill talked about Gateways. Ron Wyden and Bob Bennett's legislation calls for Health Help Agencies. The name is fundamentally unimportant. But the concept itself is the bridge between the health system we have and the health system we want.

 President Obama said that "if you don’t like your health coverage or don’t have any insurance, you will have a chance to take part in what we’re calling a Health Insurance Exchange.

By way of explanation, health insurance exchange is an organized marketplace for the purchase of health insurance set up as a governmental or quasi-governmental entity to help insurers comply with consumer protections, compete in cost-efficient ways, and to facilitate the expansion of insurance coverage to more people. Exchanges do not bear risk themselves – they are not insurers. Rather, they would contract with private insurers and possibly offer a public plan option to cover specified populations (such as those obtaining coverage through small employers and those without employer coverage).

However, with too restricted eligibility and a market share too small, it could raise premiums, encourage cherry-picking in customers, and force a clearance of the exchange. This is what happened in Texas and California in their failed exchanges.

Some experts believe that insurance exchanges can make markets more efficient, providing oversight and structure, because current health insurance markets are not well organized and have to deal with wide variations in coverages and requirements among different companies, employers, and policies
President Barack Obama promoted the concept of a health insurance exchange as a key component of his health reform initiative. Obama stated that it should be "...a market where Americans can one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose the plan that's best for them, in the same way that Members of Congress and their families can. None of these plans should deny coverage on the basis of a preexisting condition, and all of these plans should include an affordable basic benefit package that includes prevention, and protection against catastrophic costs. I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.

The Health Insurance Exchange gives you another option. Unlike your employer, it will have a wide array of competing providers offering different plans with varying benefit levels, emphases and price tags. Unlike the individual market, insurers won't be able to discriminate based on your health history or your future risk. Plans will have to be certified as meeting a minimum level of comprehensiveness. Plans that routinely screw over members will lose customers to competing insurers.

The Health Insurance Exchange, combines the benefits of choice that are theoretically available on the individual market with the bargaining power and scale that's generally accessible only in large employers (and the exchange will, in theory, have more bargaining power than even the largest employers, as it will have a much larger base of customers). You also have a space to test out innovative ideas that might make the market better, like Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-W.Va.) insurance rating agency, or the public insurance option. You can standardize billing and payment methods and force the adoption of electronic medical records.

And what happens when you introduce productive competition, efficiencies of scale, more innovation and increased consumer power into a market as dysfunctional as the current situation for health insurance? In theory, you get lower prices and higher quality. And if the Health Insurance Exchange has lower prices and higher quality, more individuals will use it and more companies will buy into it. And if that happens, then the efficiencies of scale should increase, and so should the pace of innovation (as the rewards will be greater with more customers), and so the Health Insurance Exchange should further outpace the other markets, thereby attracting yet more customers, thereby further accelerating the virtuous cycle. Eventually, it could become the country's primary insurance market.

Health insurance exchange reform may face a considerable amount of difficulties at the beginning, it's likely to be limited to individuals, the self-employed, and small businesses. Otherwise, experts worry that only businesses with sick and expensive workers will buy in, and the costs of the exchange will start high. Instead, the hope is to get it on stable footing and then progressively open it to new groups. Its success isn't a sure thing. It's a theory. But it's arguably the best one we've got

“If you already have health insurance, the only thing that is going to change for you under this plan is the amount of money you will spend on premiums,” Obama said, “That will be less than you are spending now.”

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