Statistics say that around 20% of men will be diagnosed with a critical condition before they reach retirement. While for women, the figure for having a severe health condition before reaching retirement dropped slightly to 15%.

The cause of people’s procrastination to start a critical illness plan lies in their belief that they are invincible – this is according to researchers. Although there are many reasons why you will start a critical illness plan, majority of people often just take it as a requirement to protect their mortgage payments. These days however, life insurance and critical illness cover can be linked directly with mortgage repayments.

Considering getting a health plan at a young age may not be a priority because you are still healthy. However, you will never know when you might need a critical health insurance at some point in the future. For a few dollars each week, it is very possible to protect your family financially if anything should happen to you wherein you will no longer be able to provide for them.

There are a lot of studies showing that most of us have a strong possibility to suffer from critical illness at some point in our life, especially if we have bad lifestyle habits. So now most of the insurance providers cater for these conditions.

• Medication is another area that you need to look at. Even if prescription costs are rising daily, most medication today have generic form, and many health insurance plans have low co-payments and zero deductible for generic drugs. Also try to find out if you can order your ‘maintenance drugs’ (these are the ones that you are taking for some time, and the dosage has not been changed) in bulk – like a 90 day supply for example – to cut a lot of costs.
• Finally, consider a health savings account (HSA). This plan can be very straightforward as you meet the deductible whether for an inpatient or outpatient treatment.

• Add the number of doctor visits that the entire family has in the entire year. If the average physician visit is $80 and you multiply that to the number of visits for the family, maybe you will find that having that benefit on your health insurance policy may not be that cost effective. There are some plans that include wellness benefits but there are some that do not, so you have a choice.
• Always make sure that the hospital and doctor that you prefer are in the health provider’s network of coverage. If it’s not, and you still prefer to visit that doctor or hospital, your costs will be so much higher.

With the economy on a tailspin, there are many people looking for ways on how to cut costs. One area that customers are already looking at is finding affordable health insurance coverage. Here are some secrets to help you have an affordable health insurance:
• Find insurance quotes online – most websites will only require one inquiry and it will already pull up multiple companies. If you lay these quotes out on a spreadsheet, you can already compare the benefits “apples to apples.”
• Custom build your insurance plan – one suit will not fit everything. For example, you can have lower costs and higher deductibles by adding a critical illness rider in the plan so that in the event of a cancer, stroke, or heart attack you will still be protected at a much less premium cost.

Development in the healthcare industry have helped us prolong and improve the quality of lives. Though there has been any advances, there are still about 47 million Americans, including 3.8 Million Floridians who don’t have the insurance they need and therefore don’t have the chance to use many of the medical advances available. In fact, it is the No. 1 obstruction in accessing health care and many people die because of this. Most of the reasons are actually due to financial. The government is fast to respond to their by giving away national health care, but the questions that arise are: are they fast enough and what will they do with the 47 million who are uninsured?

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A health policy is more of a wide plan that helps cover all hospitalization charges in case of sickness or disease. The insured individual can claim a policy up to the value of the sum being insured. The health plan comes in variety from which you need to pick up and choose the scheme the suits your needs.

When it comes to services offered, insurance companies should be transparent about their coverage (transparency and accountability work hand in hand). The new House Bill 1385 allowed all the insurance companies from all states to put up their company profiles, services offered, coverage and the like in one single website. Obviously, since the website is on the internet, people from all parts of the United States can access it therefore, compare insurance prices and coverage. This website can actually promote healthy competition amongst insurance companies.

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Are the government officials inefficient or is the system incurable? That was the question we’ve tackled sometime in our class. As a political science major, we’ve been dealing with government issues almost everyday of our lives.

But we realized something: these things are intertwined and are dependent on each other.

Rep. Dan Morrish of Louisiana made freezing of insurance mandates possible. However, this legislation was simply ignored by the Legislature that approved it. Louisiana now has a total of 24 mandates in line, each creating an additional expenditure to healthcare policies in Louisiana.

Photo taken from http://www.mtgfoundation.com