Re: Health Insurance
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ehealthinsurance.com,I just hope youre not from ny
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Yeah, can someone explain to me why it is impossible to get decent health insurance in NY?
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Yup, I work for a NY health insurance company so I can actually tell you why. In NY, for individual insurance policies not through a group, you HAVE to charge the same premium for everyone, regardless of someone's sex, age, health status, etc. So an obese, 60 year old woman with type I diabetes, crohn's disease, and heart disease will be offered the same policy with the same price as a 25 year old male with no chronic health problems. You are also not allowed to deny anyone insurance. And as long as you have had continuous health insurance coverage without a break of more than 63 days, preexisting conditions don't apply either.
So what does this all mean? The main consumer of these plans is people with a bevy of health problems, who will actually save money with them. Many insurance companies in NY don't even want to sell direct pay policies because of these laws. We'd rather just sell to groups only, but by law, we HAVE to at least offer individual managed care plans. We have to jack up the price to ludicrous amounts to avoid losing obscene amounts of money off these plans. I believe Empire BCBS and GHI have Hospital/emergency only type plans. A lot insurance companies don't offer them in NY because you'd lose too much money.
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