The House is about to socialize your medicine, and your life.

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by Riot

Private insurance companies do exactly that. They can even take it back after they sign a contract to do so and you've paid them. They can even take it back after they have said they would pay. They can drop an insured at any time, at their whim, as there are no laws to hold them to their side of the contract. The majority of bankruptcies in America are due to insured people paying for healthcare (google, Dell, it's everywhere).

In this, the wealthiest and most generous of countries, where all are created equal, we have thousands of our citizens getting extremely ill and dying every year because they cannot get regular basic health coverage, or they are ill and their insurance company pulls the rug out from under them and they lose their savings and their house and all they worked for their entire life.

And that is why decades have been spent trying to get health care reform instituted. Thank goodness there is a real chance of that.

That is completely untrue. Private health insurance companies cannot drop whoever they want. If insurance companies could drop people at any time, they would probably drop anyone that needed an expensive operation. If they found out that a person had cancer and that there were going to be tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, they would probably drop that person if they could. Insurance companies would probably drop anyone that consistently had high medical bills if they could.

They can't do that. What they can do, is drop people that lied to them about a pre-existing condition. If you get medical insurance tomorrow and you don't disclose that you have diabetes, cancer, or some other condition, then the insurance company can drop you. That is the only way they can drop you.

Here are a couple of articles that talk about these issues. Here is a quote from one article: "By law a health insurer can't drop you, provided you pay your premiums in a timely fassion."

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache...&ct=clnk&gl=us

Here is another article about the issue. Here is a quote from the article: "A surprising number of patients have been in the middle of costly treatment for a serious disease only to have their policies canceled, sometimes even retroactively, and found themselves responsible for astronomical bills. It’s called rescission."

“It’s a secret program that if you have a serious illness … or are on costly medications, when they get the bills, they go through [your file] and look at your application … and get medical records from the last several years. And if they find an inconsistency in your application, even if it’s an honest mistake, your policy is rescinded,” says Shernoff. “It’s a very harsh punishment visited upon a lot of people.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20186938/

This is an example of what I was talking about. They can cancel your policy if they can prove that you failed to disclose a pre-existing condition.