Article by Brenda Williams
In many people’s opinions, health insurance is a waste of money. However, you never realize how much you need it until it’s too late sometimes. For instance, if you were to suddenly take ill tomorrow but had no health insurance coverage, who do you expect would pay the FULL cost of that bill up front? That’s right; you would be responsible. Now, granted, there are those of us who never get sick and have no apparent use for health insurance.
We go through our days feeling fine and growing angrier and angrier at the fact that each month we are paying X amount of dollars for health insurance plans that we never really see the benefits of. Where is all of this money going? Can you get it back at the end of the year if you don’t use your health insurance? No. Some people aren’t even that lucky. There are a lot of people who either choose to or simply have to file for individual health insurance because their employers do not offer it or because they are self employed.
I recently spoke to a former health insurance agent of mine (I have since switched health insurance companies) and was shocked to find out that for a 26 year-old female who is in excellent health, health insurance would cost me 2 per month as of January 2009. This would be a significant jump from the 2 per month that I had been paying before. It wasn’t even that great of a deal because I still had to pay additional money out of pocket for any dental and/or routine medical checkups. It made me wonder, “Where is all of this money going?” You would think that if you’re already paying 2 per month for health insurance and barely using it that when you did go to the dentist you wouldn’t have to pay anything out of pocket. Not so. When I asked why it was so expensive to have health insurance as well as why the cost would be going up, I was told by the health insurance representative that it didn’t matter how great of health I was in. Rather, the numbers were based off of statistics- statistics which showed that women are far more likely to utilize health insurance because of pregnancy, etc. than men. Therefore, because women utilize health insurance services more, we have to pay more. This still didn’t make sense.
My thinking was that if women are using health insurance more, it means that they are actually keeping up-to-date with all of the latest shots, immunizations as well as routine checkups- thereby lowering their risk of contracting any life-threatening diseases. On the other hand, men don’t utilize it, which means that they would only go to the doctor if something was seriously wrong. What happened to the notion of “prevention being better than cure”? It seems that these high premiums make you NOT want to use the doctor at all.
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