Health care in America is the best you will find. Try having a long term illness in a country with socialized medicine. The ONLY positive on that is that in some cases, their prescription costs are less.
If you are bashing the insurance industry, they have their rules because people with pre-existing diseases and illnesses are a drain on their reserves. Companies can deny based on potential insurees being overweight as well. Fact is, for decades in America companies can and do deny coverage for those with pre-existing diseases because they are an extremely poor risk...and that is the ENTIRE premise that insurance (any) is based on---risk. People with pre-existing illnesses are an extremely poor risk.
There are even "fraternal" insurance companies that are run with no profit at all ("Woodmen of The World" for example). Others have to have massive cash reserves on hand (by state law) to pay out claims...billions, if need be.
Companies run ads & commericals encouraging people to get coverage when they are young BEFORE they get diseases or illnesses. Anyone who doesn't is simply gambling with their health care future. Sometimes they never get sick or get diseases and it pays off and the vast majority of the time they end up getting sick/injured and have to pay the entire 100% of the bill--and go bankrupt...here's another stat no one wants to hear...80% of all people who go bankrupt due to medical bills HAD major medical---and no supplimental whatsoever.
Worse yet, those who have major medical and think that it covers everything--it doesn't. MM covers about 80% of your health care bills. If you don't have a decent MM suppliment policy you get stuck for the other 20%. Most people don't think that when they get very sick or in an accident that when the bill comes to $200,000---they get stuck for $40,000 that's left over. Even while some supplimentals cost as little as a whopping $6 a week--millions of Americans don't even have it. I guess they think that scratching a check for $40,000 is no big deal.
If you want to point a finger at abuse in the system, point it at the millions who know they need insurance and don't get it. They get sick or hurt and end up in the ER--with NO insurance and expect free treatment. When they default on the bill, the cost has to be written off as a loss and as operating costs go up--costs of services go up. I have even seen private hospitals turn people with no insurance away. Public hospitals (who get national, state, or local tax dollars as funding) have to eat the loss--at the expense of people who are insured as well as taxpayers.
Go look at any hospital ER and look around. Just under half have no insurance at all. When they get treated, who pays for that? We all do.
Getting a lawyer to attempt to sue a company for refusing to write you will be a waste of your time and resources.
Companies have a right to deny writing anyone with pre-existing conditions they feel are a bad risk...that includes heart attacks, strokes, fibromyalgia, cancer, hepetitis, cirrohis, diabetes, and a laundry list of about 30 others.
Had anyone gotten coverage before their condition, they would enjoy 80% to 100% right now (depending on their coverage).
Shop around. There are some companies that WILL write you for any other condition other than your current one. There are a boatload of different kinds of cancer, yet, most companies that offer a cancer policy will write you for every other type of cancer other than the one someone already had.
It's all about risk and transferring risk of one person to a group of many.
ROX
