Should health insurance costs be lowered by disallowing certain high cost illnes!
Question: For example, I heard that there were only 350 hemopheliacs in Colorado, but their annual expenses can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Given that there are so many people who have no medical insurance for normal illnesses, because the price of insurance must cover these high-maintainenance illnesses, should there be a limit on the illnesses covered so the costs could be less and more people covered?
Answers:
Well, none of us knows what we might face in life, and the whole insurance market is a numbers game anyway. The vast majority of premiums (those paid by an individual and their employer) cover people who will not get chronically ill. Those individuals' payments far outstrip the actual health care costs they will incur over a lifetime, and they subsidize the poor unfortunates who end up with rare and expensive diseases. That's the whole point of insurance in the first place--to cover people's medical costs who could otherwise not do so themselves.
Insurance companies regularly cap coverages, disallow procedures they deem not medically necessary, and sometimes refuse to pay in circumstances where the covered individual was at fault for the injury/disease (not wearing a seat belt, suicide attempts, etc.) But going down the path of covering only select diseases is taking things a bit too far I would say. In effect, the company in question would be saying "You're a hemophiliac? Oh man, that's a shame. Good luck on that not dying thing dude." Of course we'd (as taxpayers) pick up the tab for all the emergency room visits the uninsured hemophiliacs would make, and that emergency-care-only approach may turn out to be far more expensive than covering the regular treatment and drugs which might prevent the emergencies in the first place.
Although I can see the logic of your argument, I can't say that it strikes me as a good idea. I think there may in the end be less savings than first meets the eye, and that our society has a certain self-interested obligation to take care of those people who are in need.
Other Answers:
Hell no. God forbid you end up in the same situation. Your definitely going to want all the resources & help you can get.
I agree with puma. A person with a high-cost illness definitely needs help in paying for it. Besides, almost everyone suffers from a high-cost illness sometime during their lifetime, so you might too. Do you want to be stuck with mounting medicine and hospital bills? You'd go into debt!
If pregnacy/birth were not covered, the cost of insurance would go way down. Pregnancy/birth has about the largest slice of the insurance pie. Fortunately we believe a healthy pregnancy will help ensure a healthy birth and insurance will help to cover these costs.
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