Medical Insurance

Medical insurance is more than just safeguard of your health - it also prevents you from extra expenses. Bills from medical institutions even for situations not threatening your life can lead to the fail of your finances. Health insurance also aids to maintain healthy people. American College of Physicians states that uninsured people who are likely to have deadly or serious diseases like pancreatic or breast cancer can be diagnosed by regular inspections. Thus, uninsured persons have fewer chances to get disease-prevention service than insured ones, their risk of death raises to 50 percent.

Health insurance can significantly reduce your expenses as most part of medical compensations is divided between an insured person and a medical care provider. So-called "network discounts" are set by medical organizations and insurance companies, nevertheless the price for insured persons is always lower than prices paid by uninsured persons.

Who Risks to Be Uninsured

Do you think you can risk and live with no health insurance? Learn the statistics in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Women's Health and the report of MSNBC.com: the number of uninsured Americans has increased to over 44 million people - the majority of them being from working families.Youth aged from 19 to 29 are the largest group with no medical insurance. Insurers call them "young invincibles" as they think their youth can protect them someway. Nonetheless, life is rather sever and doesn't protect from illnesses or incidents, and without having affordable health insurance young people can suddenly appear with large medical expenses.

Women without medical insurance represent another huge group of Americans - more than 16 million. They suffer from diseases and damages more often as they use to spend much time trying to use their own methods of treatment. Majority of health insurance institutions use prophylactic measures like gynecological and breast inspection that could prevent many serious female diseases.

The absence of affordable health insurance can even lead to death as persons without medical insurance usually die earlier than those with insurance, often because they don't pass preventive medical care.

Medical debts can quickly cause financial crisis. In compliance with the latest research of Harvard University, nearly 50 percent of all bankruptcies were partly caused by medical debts. Other research showed that over 25 percent of those who took part in the survey had different financial problems because of extra medical expenses.

Consider the cost of not having health insurance. If you are involved in an accident on your way to work, or contract a serious illness, you have to pay the hospital bills from your own pocket. This also means that you have to pay a deposit before admittance to private hospitals. If your spouse or children get seriously ill or hurt, the medical costs can lead to a total depletion of your savings. It may even cause bankruptcy. Another reason is that your family will have to settle for public health care facilities, and wait in line with hundreds of other patients. Apart from that, you still have to pay for expensive operations that are not covered under public health care.

Reasons why you cannot afford not to have medical insurance:

• Late diagnosis of serious diseases, and as a consequence, higher risk of mortality.
• Workers and their families that are not insured don't go for regular medical check-ups.
• Many persons, who lack health insurance, don't go to doctors, or make use of prescriptions. This means that people settle for over the counter medicine, even in cases where more advanced medication are needed.
• A large proportion of uninsured people use the emergency care as their only medical facility. This indicates that injuries or illnesses are only medically treated when the conditions become critical.
• Higher mortality rate in cases of diabetes.
• Large medical bills that cannot be paid. This in turn may lead to unwanted lifestyle changes.
• Hospitalization for conditions that could have been avoided, if proper and timely medical care was given.