One question which people commonly ask is whether they really need health insurance or whether they can live without it. Unfortunately, this is not always an easy question to answer and the answer will depend very much on who you ask.
You might argue that if you are fit, healthy and reasonably young then you can out off worrying about health insurance until you need it because there is little point in paying health insurance premiums month after month when you haven’t been sick or needed to visit a doctor for several years. It’s a bit like car insurance. You’ve driven your car for years and paid your premiums every month because the law requires you to do so but you’re a careful driver, have never had an accident and have never needed to make a claim.
But what will happen tomorrow when you are driving along as carefully as ever and some drunken young idiot with no license or insurance slams into you at high speed causing considerable damage to both you and your car and landing you in the emergency room needing immediate life-saving surgery?
Of course if you live in a country such as United Kingdom, Canada, France or Norway then you are lucky because medical care is provided free of charge and any costs incurred are reimbursed by the government. But, if you live in the United States the vast majority of healthcare bills have to be met privately or from insurance and medical bills can be extremely high.
So, whether you are young, fit and healthy or not you need to consider health insurance for those unforeseen events which we all hope will never happen to us but which unfortunately do hit us from time to time.
Health insurance is a complex area and the choices available from basic individual plans to complex family health insurance plans are bewildering. Should you choose a traditional indemnity plan or a managed care plan? If you opt for managed care should you go for an HMO, a PPO or a POS? Do you even know what HMOs, PPOs and POSs are what the differences are between these three types of managed care plan? And then of course there are also group schemes rather than individual cover. Are you eligible to join a group scheme and, if so, will it also cover your family? Will your group scheme give you all of the cover you need or should you consider supplementing it with additional individual cover?
Buying health insurance today is not a simple matter of just picking up the phone and getting your insurance company to send you out an application form, but is something that you need to think about carefully and for which you need to take the time to do your research and make the choice that is right for you. But don’t put it off because you may end up paying the bill for uninsured medical costs for many years to come.
