Cheaper Health Care Insurance - Do Your Best To Grasp How They Reason And Pay Less PDF Print E-mail
Written by Chimezirim Odimba   
Saturday, 10 April 2010 15:50
If you really want affordable health insurance then you'd do well to take a peep into the minds of those who determine what policy holders pay as premiums. By understanding their thinking processes, you'll know how to make adjustments that will help you get superior coverage for much less...
by ChimezirimOdimba


A sure way of being better positioned for cheaper rates is to know how insurers determine what your pay as premium. By understanding their thinking processes, you'll know how to make adjustments that will help you get superior coverage for much less...

The world of insurance is all about risk management. The important skill they've developed is ensuring they do NOT put themselves into high risk position while doing this. In fact they really do ensure they make reasonable profit by taking care of you. So how do they determine how risky it is to give you coverage?

Over years, they've come up with a list of pointers to good health or failing health. Things like your Body Mass Index, your cholesterol level, your general lifestyle, your medical history and whether you use tobacco. They don't fail to also check things like your family health history, if you have a pre-existing condition, if you're diabetic and others.

With such details, it's quite easy for trained professionals to determine how risky it would be for an insurer to provide coverage for a given prospect.

To make the task easier for them, they have broad groupings for prospects. You'll hear stuff like "uninsurable" or "standard". These are all functions of how risky they find you. And, that is just the beginning...

Different people will check differently to a list of all the indicators used to measure a prospect (some are listed earlier in this article). So to further determine your exact risk profile, an insurer will take steps to really know how you personal check against each of those factors.

For each indicator, each insurer chooses a different relevancy score. Insurers give these weightings or relevancy scores based on their unique experience and expertise. One thing results: A huge disparity in the way each insurer scores each factor. This brings about a huge disparity in end results considering the many variable or indicators used.

So how does this affect you?...

If you want affordable health insurance and there are hundreds of insurance carriers to pick from, how do you know for sure who'd offer best rate (Or better still, plan)?

Important NOTE: By law, carriers cannot give cheaper rates for the exact same plan. Be that as it may, to make sure they have appropriate rates for different risk profiles (and therefore stay competitive and turn some profits) they instead offer very many different plans for these very specific profiles. At the moment, the US has over 10,000 such plans for customers to choose from. Sounds like the same thing as giving different rates for, say, 10 plans if you ask me -- Only more confusing ).

You'd have to get many quotes, compare plans and then choose whichever is the best for you.

DISCLAIMER: This article is provided as information only and is not to be taken as financial advice.