What Factors Affect Colorado Individual Health Insurance?
When searching for individual health insurance plans, a number of key factors must be considered before choosing a final policy. There are the options of HMO and PPO categories of plans, the amount of out of pocket costs (annual deductibles and co-pays), and the financial stability of the insurance provider to evaluate. However, the most important factor to influence your insurance coverage is the health insurance company's practices on the medical underwriting of new policies.
The medical underwriting practice for individual health care policies is significantly different from what happens with group health benefit programs. By law, in a group health insurance plan, there should be no discrimination in benefits or coverage available to any individual in the group based on that person's specific health status. Alternatively, for individual insurance plans, discrimination as a result of an individual's specific health status is actively performed now and is absolutely legal! If a consumer who applies for an individual health benefits plan has a pre-existing condition, the insurance company is free to deny insurance to the applicant or to provide coverage that excludes the pre-existing condition.
This will occur as a result of the necessary medical underwriting of every new health care benefits policy which applies to the majority of new policies purchased by consumers in the open marketplace. What the intent of medical underwriting really means is that the health insurance company is evaluating the likely financial risk under the proposed policy based on the individual health status of the applicant. Before considering a new insurance policy, consumers should talk to the medical underwriting team of the insurance company early in the process to find out how they treat certain medical issues.