I finally found that my state, New Mexico, has an health plan for
uninsurable people and it's with Blue Cross/Shield. It's called
New Mexico Health Insurance Pool and "one" needs to send a
rejection letter from an Insurance company to show the inability to
get insurance. Perhaps other states have this also. It's certainly
worth a try. My monthly cost is $365.00.
Wow. That’s cheap. Here in Washington state, they have an
“interesting” system. If you don’t have access to group insurance
through an employer (or even if you do, but don’t wish to get it),
you can go buy a health insurance plan privately from a number of
insurance companies. So far, so good. However, the state insurance
commission has set up uniform procedures that all must follow. To
apply for an individual policy, you have to fill out a health
history questionaire that’s written by the state insurance
commission. That questionaire assigns scores for various conditions
both past and present. In my own case, I’ve been a type one (insulin
dependent) diabetic for 43 years. I control it well, but have, after
all these years, had some complications (most notably, the need for a
heart bypass operation.) In any case, Type one diabetes, if there is
any history of any complications, is assigned a specific score. The
questionaire is set up so that in order to qualify to buy a policy,
you must have a score under a certain cut off point. If you do, then
the insurance company may not deny you a policy. If you are over that
score, they are not allowed to sell you a policy at all. The score I
get for the diabetes with any past complications is by itself above
the cutoff score, so in the State of Washington, no insurance company
will, or is even allowed to, sell me an individual insurance policy.
However, for people in that situation, there is another option. The
state runs a state “high risk pool” insurance policy, funded by all
the insurance companies together. This is to ensure that all
companies share equally in the cost of those of us who are more
costly to insure. If you don’t qualify for the normal individual
policy, you automatically qualify to buy the high risk pool policy.
And it’s a great policy, with great coverage, low deductables, high
limits, just what the chronically ill folks need.
But there’s a catch. Last I checked, a couple years ago, the month
premium for this wonderful insurance coverage was over 1500 dollars a
month. Something like 18 thousand dollars a year. There are no other
real options other than going without insurance (not viable for me).
Oh, excuse me. There is. If you earn less than the federal poverty
level (I forget by how much less it must be), then you can apply to
get into the state subsidized basic health policy. This is bare bones
coverage, mostly for catastrophic emergencies. No prescriptions, no
drugs (insulin is currently well over a hundred dollars a bottle, and
I use five bottles per month). And with the current state budget
crisis, they’ve slashed the number of people they will enrol. They
kicked off a bunch of folks, and there’s a multi year waiting line to
get in now. Mostly, it’s now for poor families with kids. I’d be
pretty much out of luck.
So what it means is that if you’ve got a health history of any sort
of serious chronic disease, as I do, in order to buy a health
insurance policy in this state, you need to be able to afford that
whopping premium, and as you might imagine, I cannot.
If I did not work for an employer who offers a group health
insurance policy (which must accept me), then I simply would have no
other option but to simply move to another state. Not such a good
prospectus were I to loose my job, or try to start my own business…
I’d be pretty much forced to leave the state and go somewhere with
better access to coverage
It’s all well and good to talk about people having options and
choices. But the truth is, some of us are literally trapped without
any real choices or options available. As it is, I do have good
coverage thanks to my employer. But without that? Nope. No way to do
it.
And given the usual wages in the jewelry industry, especially for
bench people, I’ll bet I’m not the only one in a similar situation.
It will be interesting to see if it improves at all in 2014…
Sorry for the rant.
:Peter Rowe
