Personal Health Insurance

What You Should Know About Personal Health Insurance

There are many reasons to have personal health insurance in some form, whether through a federally funded program, short-term emergency plan, group or employer-based plan, or individual health insurance. Since health insurance is generally expensive in the U.S. , the decision to have health insurance should be a personal choice for each individual. On the other hand, social and health effects occur in communities when any percentage of the population is uninsured.

Research has shown that people without personal health insurance are less likely to seek preventive care, and as a result, are more likely to suffer poor health. This means they are hospitalized more often than insured Americans and receive late-term diagnoses of life-threatening disease more often than insured people. In other words, the mortality rate of uninsured people is higher than for the insured.

Social Costs of No Personal Health Insurance

In the household and local community, people in contact with uninsured citizens can also experience problems. Children who attend school with students who don't receive adequate care are exposed to more sickness. Families without personal health insurance who experience an accident or sudden illness lose income, will run up personal medical bills, and as a result will lean more on social services and incur costs on the community. People who share a household with an uninsured ill person are likely to incur these costs as well, both financially and psychologically.

As you can see, there is no up side to living without personal health insurance. Young people in college and in their twenties commonly skip health insurance, preferring to pay their own bills. While this approach works in many cases, it can prove catastrophic in the case of an accident or life-threatening diagnosis. Moreover, many conditions and diseases prevent uninsured people from signing on to a personal health insurance plan.

Thus, while the choice of personal health insurance is an individual choice, families and communities should strive to communicate the importance of health care coverage for these reasons.

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