The process of risk rating is essentially the formula that health insurance companies use to charge sick people exorbitant fees for health coverage – or to deny them coverage altogether. As anyone who has ever had a serious illness knows, the last thing your insurance company wants to do is pay for your treatments. After all, treatments and medical care are expensive, so why should your health insurance company want to pay for those things?
Could it be because that’s what you’ve been paying them to do – to take care of you when you actually need to use the “insurance”? That’s really too philosophical of an approach to a business problem. In order to make the insanely huge profits that drive our broken health care model, insurance companies need to charge healthy people large sums of money every month in the hopes that they never really need any medical care. Then they need to avoid providing insurance coverage to people who are already sick – that’s just bad business.
But now that there seems to be some momentum building for lawmakers to actually reform the health care system in this country, the industry has decided to make some “concessions”. Hopefully, these offers will be laughed at for what they are and lawmakers will be able to focus on making real changes to the system. Ultimately, expect little or no change as the money and power at play in this game will be far too great for mere politicians to ignore.
