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Audience Participation: Pre-Existing Conditions
R. Alex Whitlock
It's apparently commonplace among insurance carriers that if you've gone more than a certain time period without health insurance, pre-existing conditions are not covered for the first year. Do/did your insurance carriers have such a policy and if they did, how long was the time period? I went roughly a month without insurance last year. Eel (who works in a HOSPITAL) doesn't have any coverage for pre-existing conditions if you went without insurance for a single month in the last ten years. If so, that means I'm going to have to be very careful about when I go to the doctor in relation to possible health problems so that I'm not diagnosed and it's not a "pre-existing condition."
Observations
Pre-existing conditions are a bummer. Especially if you have something ongoing that you're going to have to deal with.
My best suggestion is yeah, be very careful about when you wind up going in, so nothing is diagnosed as pre-existing.
My insurance has no such requirement. Then again, my contribution to insurance coverage is quite a bit higher than that of other folks. That probably explains why.
Alex,
I know quite a bit about this, actually. It sucks; it creates disincentives to care. You have some protection under a federal law known as HIPAA. There are lots of good resources on this on the WWW.
Yes, ask Daniel.
My mother finally managed to get coverage; if she goes a year with good bone-density levels and no fosamax or other medicine for osteo, then her plan will begin covering preventive osteo medication. (as makes sense -- the plan would cover full-out osteo, if she got it, but not preventive medication, because she was already taking that. That didn't make sense at all. We want you to get super-sick, and we'll pay for that!)
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