Health Insurance Coverage

Get answers to the questions like what is health insurance and the purpose of health insurance here…
Health Insurance Coverage
Health insurance provides money to pay bills generated by illness. Situations covered by Health insurance are described in the Health insurance policy, the policy is a legal contract, and the cost of the contract is called the premium. Health insurance, therefore, can be defined as a contract that provides money to cover all or a portion of the cost of medically necessary care.

Health insurance differs from other types of insurance in one important area: while the individual is almost always responsible for providing life, car, and liability insurance, health insurance is often provided to the individual as an employment benefit. In addition, the state and federal government are also involved in providing health insurance for certain populations: people over sixty-five years old, individuals receiving public assistance, and individuals with certain disabilities such as blindness and end-stage renal disease. Currently, employers or government programs provide most health insurance coverage.

Purpose of Health Insurance:
Monetary consequences of health risk and, by increasing access to care, make possible some improvement of the threats to health which can be helped directly by the Health insurance. This is the major two reasons why greater part of Americans who are not at all eligible for voluntary public insurance arrange seek for insurance coverage for there own purpose as well as for their dependents.

The study investigates the extent of risk pooling in private health insurance markets in the United States. At present, such markets are subject to hodgepodge of state and federal regulations, with rules, mandates, and subsidies ebbing and flowing at a moderately rapid rate. It is the present unsettled state of these markets that provides the policy motivation for questions about performance.

Despite some significant erosion, the employment based mechanism is currently by far the most common why of furnishing private health insurance to consumers in the United States. The performance of the employment based market is increasingly criticized, from both the left and the right, as deficient and inadequate. This study will suggest ways to improve public policy and private behavior.

The policy trade-off is between group health insurance, provided through the employment setting and non-group health insurance, marketed and purchased in the same way as other consumer insurances, such as homeowner’s or auto insurance.

Three Different Markets
Private health insurance in the United States is sold in three different markets with different economic structures. The smallest market is that for non-group or individual health insurance, a market much like the setting in which almost all American consumers buys their fire, auto, theft or life insurance. While some of this non-group health insurance supplements group insurance, there is a portion of the population, estimated to be about seven percent of those with private insurance that obtains its primary health insurance in this setting. In contract, group health insurance furnishes coverage for the majority of the population and is overwhelmingly based on employment related groups. Practices and performance differ somewhat between small group and all other group health insurance.

Risk Sharing and Voluntary Markets:
Basic economics teaches that unregulated competitive markets will inevitably lead to prices for any purchased product that are equal or nearly so to the cost of producing or financing that product. When insured’s vary in the expected cost of their health insurance benefits, even under a uniform, single insurance policy, the tendency in competitive markets is for premiums to reflect those cost differences - for premiums to be based on risk. Here risk is defined as a measure of expected insurance benefits. In such cases, insurance still very much pools risk, but the risk it pools is the risk of unexpected things: which individuals, among a set of apparently similar insured’s, will actually get sick and use care. It is not the variation in loss probability, which is assumed to be already known.

Conclusion:
The most important gap in risk pooling is the incompleteness or absence of insurance coverage, risk of chronic and costly conditions and failure to pool risk associated with age, gender, or location may not always be regarded as seriously undesirable on equity grounds.

By Jayashree Pakhare
Published: 2/14/2008

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