> What would be very valuable would be a crowdsourced version of these charts.
Could not agree more with your post, and the item quoted above in particular.
(My own case: I'm as healthy as an ox, wife has inflammatory arthritis, which makes the application look like a book. When everything is done, you can be sure that we end up paying $JACKED_RATE*$MYSTERY_FACTOR.)
My daughter had what we're pretty sure was a drug reaction seizure when she was 4. Uninsurable.
You can also expect that any woman with any reproductive health issue, no matter how common, will be automatically declined for private health insurance, and will at best be able to obtain outrageously expensive last-resort insurance with a rider excluding huge swaths of her physiology.
But these sound like simple gripes about how broken our insurance system is. That's not my point. My point is that the rates you get on a website like this have no bearing on the rates you'll actually be contractually promised, unless you are a healthy male in your 20s.
I wonder if advertised rates like this are somehow based on average group coverage rates. It's completely whack, but, none of this stuff applies in group coverage. In group, you tell your provider "here's how many families, couples, and singles we have", and I think maybe the ages, and then you get a simple number for each category.
Would it be worth it, or even possible, to find a few other families in similar situations and create a dummy corporation which "employs" all of your families? All of you could collectively pay for a share of the group premiums -- ironically, I think this is similar to how health insurance was originally intended to function.
In CA at least, there are rules about a regular salary going to the insured employee.
That said: If you have a startup paying you regularly, I believe there are non-exclusionary laws preventing the insurance company from excluding employees which makes it a good avenue to pursue. I know folks that structured buyouts so that they would continued to be employed (and paid) by a shell company simply to maintain insurance.
> You can also expect that any woman with any reproductive health issue, no matter how common, will be automatically declined for private health insurance
Not so fast. If she never goes "bare", she can't be denied for pre-existing conditions.
Is it really that hard for people who know that they have chronic conditions to act as if they have chronic conditions?
What do you mean, "goes bare"? My family has had continuous coverage since I get married, and both me and my wife had continuous coverage prior to that. Are you trying to say it's impossible to be denied coverage? You're wrong.
I'm not going to get into the severity of the "chronic conditions" we're talking about because they're none of your business, but based on prevalence in the population, it's crazy that they're auto-decline conditions.
Could not agree more with your post, and the item quoted above in particular.
(My own case: I'm as healthy as an ox, wife has inflammatory arthritis, which makes the application look like a book. When everything is done, you can be sure that we end up paying $JACKED_RATE*$MYSTERY_FACTOR.)