What Factors Affect Oklahoma Individual Health Insurance?
When searching for individual health care insurance policies, a number of key factors must be evaluated before choosing a final policy. There are the options of HMO and PPO programs, the amount of out of pocket costs (yearly deductibles and co-pays), and the financial stability of the insurance provider to evaluate. However, the most significant factor to influence your insurance coverage is the health insurance provider's practices on the medical underwriting of new policies.
The medical underwriting practice for individual health benefit policies is significantly different from what is required for group health benefit programs. By law, in a group health insurance plan, there should not be discrimination in benefits or coverage available to any individual member of the group based on that person's specific health status. Alternatively, for individual insurance plans, discrimination due to an individual's specific health status is routinely performed now and is absolutely legal! If a consumer who applies for an individual health insurance plan has a pre-existing condition, the insurance provider is free to refuse insurance to the applicant or to provide coverage that excludes the pre-existing condition.
This will occur as a result of the process of medical underwriting of every new health care benefits policy which is applied to most new policies purchased by consumers in the open marketplace. What the intent of medical underwriting really means is that the health insurance provider is evaluating the likely financial risk attributable to the proposed policy based on the individual health status of the applicant. Before considering a new insurance policy, consumers would be wise to talk to the medical underwriting team of the insurance provider early in the process to find out how they treat certain medical issues.