Healthcare: The Rising Costs and Lack of Coverage

Many Americans are uninsured or under-insured due to the lack of availability of affordable Health Care coverage. There are three general options for Health Care coverage. The first is employer-sponsored group health care plans. These are plans where your employer pays the lion's share of premium costs. This usually makes health care much more affordable for the employee. The second is COBRA continuation of benefits. This is a service available for a limited amount of time after an employee terminates employment with a company which offered health care benefits. The cost of COBRA is generally extremely expensive. The third option is Individually purchased Health Insurance. These are plans which an individual or family can purchase without an employer. The costs are usually high and they require a large amount of health questions and a waiting period for coverage. If you have a pre-existing condition, such as a heart problem or diabetes, you will most likely be denied for coverage or charged a significantly higher premium.

With the rising costs of health insurance, many employers are not offering Medical benefits or are offering them only to select employees. This makes it harder for people to find health coverage. Typically, group plans offered by your employer are less expensive than personal plans you can purchase yourself. This is because with a group plan, the employer pays a large percentage of the total premium costs, so the employee's share is significantly cheaper.

My family is the perfect example of an under-insured American family. My husband's employer does not offer any health care or dental care benefits to their employees. I am a stay at home mom, and therefore do not have benefits available to me. Due to our situation, we were forced to purchase an individual health insurance plan or face our fears and live without medical insurance. Our health plan alone costs more than half of what we pay in rent each month, and we still have to pay $40 for each doctor visit, 40% of any laboratory work and x-rays, and a $5,000 deductible if we are ever hospitalized.

Normally, we would have never chosen a plan with those options, but since individual the rates are higher, this was the only plan we could afford to purchase. The only other option we had was to go without Health Care Insurance. If we did this, the costs of a simple broken leg could be tens of thousands of dollars alone. Not to mention that a simple doctor's office visit would be around $300. Since we have a toddler, we feel that Health Care is a necessity, not an option. So, we are forced to pay the high costs of individual health care insurance until my husband is able to find a job which offers these benefits.

We are lucky because even though the premiums are high, we are still able to manage the payments. However, many people are in similar situations where they don't have health coverage at work and can't afford these high individual premiums. That is one of the biggest reasons why so many people are without health insurance. If the costs of health insurance were more affordable, more people could get the care they need.