Cheap health insurance and your lifestyle

The way insurance companies work is straightforward and easy to understand. If you are basically healthy when you take out the policy and stay that way for years, you are a major source of profit and the insurers love you. But if you are already diagnosed with a serious and long-term disease or disorder, the insurers is looking at paying out from the moment it accepts you as a policyholder. Hence, insurers positively discriminate in favor of the healthy and either refuse cover or sell cover at very high rates to those who are at risk of disease.

So exactly who are those at risk of disease? Well, as the World Health Organization has been telling us for years, we have an epidemic of obesity in all developed countries and many of those emerging from poverty. The medical effect is easy to describe. Those who are overweight are more likely to suffer cardiovascular disease, develop diabetes and show up with some cancers earlier than usual. If you add in the usual suspects of those who continue to smoke, drink too much alcohol and live the lives of couch potatoes, we are a nation planning to fall ill at the earliest possible moment. Even among those who are young and fit, only too willing to take off their shirts and show superb muscular development, there are the problems of sports and hobbies more likely to case physical injuries. You do not get to appear in the X-Games until you have broken bones and pulled muscles skateboarding or rollerblading. When you add in activities like surfing, parkour and ski-diving, the chances of ending up in an ER go up even higher.

One of the main purposes of the medical examination often required to get heath insurance is to get a positive picture of you. So prepare. You will be asked for a urine sample which detects whether you are smoking or taking drugs without a prescription. Change to a healthy diet and fast before giving blood to improve your carbohydrate levels. If you know your blood pressure is high, get it treated. When you attend for the examination, look clean, respectable and responsible. This will encourage the person assessing you to believe you take care of your health and result not only in your being accepted but also being offered cheap health insurance.

Cheap health insurance — group or individual plans?

When looking for cheap health insurance, what do you do if offered a choice between a group and an individual plan? Which is the cheap health insurance option?

As the names suggest, an individual plan is a policy you buy from a private health insurance company, whereas a group plan is one you access because you belong to a group of people. The most common form of group plan is offered by employers. As the US fell into a recession, business at all levels found the going tough. Now, even though there is a tax credit to encourage small businesses to continue and, in some cases, expand health coverage, most employers have been asking their employees to pay more. Even so, these employment-based plans tend to be cheap health insurance as the risks are spread out among quite large groups of people.