If you have health insurance, are you covered for all catastrophic illnesses? If you are like most working Americans, you are covered for many conditions, but you likely have a gaping hole in your coverage that could find you sick and uninsured. Do you know what it is? Here is a hint, you will never find it documented as an excluded illness by your insurance company.
In "The Healing of America," T.R.Reid writes about Nikki White whose lack of insurance lead to her death, but at the time of her diagnosis, she had insurance. The problem with her insurance was that it did not cover her after she had to stop working. Once her employment ended, so did her health insurance, but her chronic life-threatening condition continued.
Would you be any better off if you became ill with a life-long chronic condition that required you to stop working? Disability insurance might replace much of your lost income, but your employer-based health insurance would eventually end.
If you can afford it, you will have a right to purchase health coverage through your employer for 18 months. After that, you will be on your own. Perhaps, you will be lucky enough to qualify for a limited safety net program, but as in Nikki White's case, you may at some point be told you are not needy enough. Once your insurance has been terminated, you will have a preexisting condition so it will be extremely unlikely that you will be able to buy insurance on the individual market.
How common is this problem? Good data on this issue is not easily available. However, according to a recent article in the American Journal of Medicine, most bankruptcies in the U.S. are related to healthcare costs, and 78% of people with these medically related bankruptcies had insurance at the time they first got sick. This would imply that Nikki While was not alone in her misfortune.
Proposed federal legislation will make this situation less of a problem by making it illegal for companies to discriminate against patients with pre-existing conditions. For those of you who live in Massachusetts, you may already be protected by laws that promote universal coverage. If you lose your current coverage, at least you will be able to find an alternative. If you live in the US outside of Massachusetts and you lose your insurance, you have a problem. Until legislation is signed and implemented for the rest of the country, most Americans will unknowingly be at risk.
