It can be the bane of many people’s lives. Deciding exactly which health insurance provider to choose and which plan by that provider will be the best has always been a challenge, but one way you can make the whole process simpler is by understanding exactly how health insurance companies work.
What is it to you?
Affordable health insurance is effectively a subscription to healthcare. As you pay a monthly premium in order to stay insured, you can then receive any healthcare that you might need in this period for a much lower cost than if you were to be uninsured. Since you’ve already paid into the health insurance “pot”, you’ll have significantly less, or even nothing, to pay in the case of any medical emergencies happening to you or anyone else on your health insurance plan.
What about more expensive emergencies?
They’ll have their costs lowered just as the cost of cheaper procedures are, or the cost might even be removed entirely. This can be afforded because insurance is a sharing of risk, between everyone with insurance. Since the majority of people are healthy the majority of the time, the amount that people pay in is used to make sure anyone unhealthy can be treated. This all comes around again when the healthy people get ill, and take some money from the collective pot in order to get themselves treated. Insurance is, put simply, millions of people working together to keep everyone’s lives affordable in a time of crisis.
What does all this mean for me?
If you have a better understanding of how health insurance works, it becomes easier to understand why different plans cover different procedures. For example, if you’re paying very little in, it’s fair to assume that you won’t get as much out since you’re not contributing much to other people’s procedures. Additionally, it will help you to understand why putting more people on a plan makes the plan more expensive, since there’s a higher risk of someone being ill and taking out of their cash plan.
Ultimately, health insurance is designed to protect everyone that uses it, albeit to different extents based on price. If you want the most bang for your buck, it’s always best to use Compare Insurance to compare Health Insurance providers tools to guarantee a wide coverage for a low price.