If you are looking for Ohio Health Insurance then you have a number of options when it comes to getting cover.
Most people opt to get their health insurance in Ohio through their workplace policy (53%), because there are a number of advantages including cost, convenience and that you don’t generally need a medical.
However, Group Ohio Health Insurance is not open to everybody, either because they do not work or hence don’t have access to a workplace policy; they cannot afford the cover, or have been rejected for cover perhaps because of a pre-existing condition.
Insurance Companies in Ohio are in business to make money, and whilst there is a certain level of tip-toeing around that perspective in their marketing, for example showing the caring faces of health professionals rather their accountant counting the cash! The fact is that will not readily accept anyone who poses a risk to their bottom line profits.
Much of the thrust of the Affordable Care Act is to redress many of the imbalances between the fact that many health insurance company terms and conditions seem actively designed to minimize their spending on health care.
As a business aim this is understandable, but it does nevertheless raise serious issues about whether the current system is really effective for the users who need to use greater amounts of health care, and are not simply there to make up the numbers and feel protected without ever actually making any claims.
The two main areas where the Affordable Care Act attempts to do this is through the High Risk Pool which is designed to be a kind of one-stop-shop for people who cannot get covered by Ohio Health Insurance because the companies regard them as too great a risk, and also by stopping insurance companies from having either yearly or lifetime limits on the amount of cover that can be paid out.
This used to be a surprisingly common practice, with Price Waterhouse Coopers estimating in 2009 that over 50% of policies at the time had lifetime limits set on them, with a rough split on average at either the $1 million or $2 million level.
Those limits may sound very high, but the fact is that health care costs are ridiculously high in the United States. When you consider that an intestine transplant for example costs $1.2 million and a heart transplant $1 million in 2011 according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, it is very easy to see how people can very easily exceed those lifetime limits with sometimes just one or two procedures.
In fact, the actual cost of the surgeon to perform the operations is a relatively small percentage of the cost. In the example of the above intestine and heart transplant surgeries, less than 10% of the cost was due to the cost of the physician, with the vast bulk (2/3rds) going directly to the hospital.
The real impact of this therefore is that you don’t need something as dramatic as transplant surgery for bills to quickly accumulate in an Ohio hospital, because simply being admitted to the hospital for a stay of any kind will provide sky high bills.
One of the central tenets of the Affordable Care Act is in fact to make lifetime limits illegal.
This is welcome news because it was estimated in 2009 that some 25,000 people had been affected by lifetime limits, and the older you are the more impact it has, because you are likely to need more medical treatment as you age. But ironically that was the time when you were most likely to be affected by lifetime limits.
If you cannot get a Group Ohio Health Insurance Policy, then you should take a look at Individual Ohio Health Insurance Plans and see what they have to offer.
If they too are unavailable to you, then check out the new High Risk Pools that are being made available around the country.
Whilst health insurance in Ohio may always be a thorny subject, you can get good cover if you take the time to carefully assess your options.
