What Factors Affect Ohio Individual Health Insurance?
When searching for individual health coverage, a number of key factors should be taken into account before choosing a final policy. There are the options of the HMO and PPO approaches to insurance, the amount of out of pocket costs (deductibles and co-pays), and the financial stability of the insurance provider to evaluate. However, the most relevant factor to influence your insurance coverage is the insurance company's procedures on the medical underwriting of new policies.
The medical underwriting practice for individual insurance plans is significantly different from the procedures of group health benefit programs. By law, in a group health insurance plan, there must not be any discrimination in benefits or coverage available to any individual group member based on that person's specific health status. Alternatively, for individual insurance plans, discrimination arising from an individual's specific health status is a routine practice today and is absolutely legal! If a consumer who applies for an individual health care benefits policy has a pre-existing condition, the insurance company may refuse coverage to the person or to provide coverage that excludes the pre-existing condition.
This will occur as a result of the requirement for medical underwriting of every new health care benefits policy which is applied to new policies purchased by consumers in the open marketplace. What the intent of medical underwriting really means is that the health benefits provider is evaluating the likely financial risk likely to arise from the new policy based on the individual health status of the applicant. Before considering a new insurance policy, consumers can always talk to the medical underwriting team in the health insurance company first to find out how they treat certain medical issues.