Try to do an online search for health insurance quotes, and you’ll often find that the insurance vendors just can’t agree on what to charge for a policy. They lawfully charge wildly different prices for the exact same kind of coverage. They do this because each company has a different policy in how to deal with different kinds of risk. What your health insurance costs are in other words, completely boil down to what the formula is that each company likes to work with.
To one company, a pre-existing blood pressure situation may spell doom and destruction and they may use it as a way to charge you very high prices. At another company, their formula may require them to not even take notice of this.
If you take a look at the different kinds of physical and medical risk factors that insurance companies like to include in their formulas to determine what your health insurance costs should be, you’ll find that every health insurance provider’s there are some risk factors always remain important.
Your body mass index happens to be an important factor in how much of a risk you present to the insurance companies. Since even slightly higher-than-normal levels of body weight can put you at risk for diabetes, arthritis, heart problems and other expensive diseases, the health insurance companies handily make your insurance premiums a lot more expensive when they see a weight problem.
If there’s one thing that all the health insurance companies agree on, it’s that tobacco users need to be made to pay – make to pay for how much their habit can cost at the hospital. What they don’t agree on is if tobacco users need to be given healthcare at all.
Most major health insurance providers will completely deny tobacco users any coverage at all – at any price. They’ll even deny quitters who’ve given up the habit over the past 10 years. Because it takes the body a long time to recover. And since one-time tobacco users will always be at a higher risk of cancer, the healthcare scenario doesn’t really look good for anyone who is even dabbled in tobacco use.
What all the insurance companies don’t agree on is how to weigh your profession, or the neighborhood you live in. You’re probably thinking to yourself that you can understand how a choice of profession may be risky – a person who works in a mine or someone who pulls a night shift driving a large truck and will certainly present a higher risk.
So will people who have desk jobs (like insurance evaluators for instance) and people whose jobs never allow them any opportunity for exercise. But what did the person ever do wrong living in a certain ZIP code?
Well, it works kind of in an amusing way. They look at your zip code to see what kind of health insurance costs your neighbors carry. If your neighbors happen to pay a high price for their health insurance, the insurance company figures that there must be something wrong with your area even if they can’t figure it out. And they raise what you pay.
As you can see, your health insurance costs do depend on a number of factors that are just not easy to measure. You just have to go from company to company – shop around to try your luck.
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