by Brigette Courtot, Policy Analyst
National Women’s Law Center
This post is part of a weekly series on Women and Health Reform.
In previous blog posts, we’ve called it the “Wild, Wild West” of health insurance. In the new report we released a few weeks ago, we described it as a “last resort” for coverage. There are just so many ways to describe the individual health insurance market and the problems that women and their families encounter there. The first of a 3-part series published in the LA Times earlier this week reports that individual market policies “often the only coverage available, are pricey and precarious.” The article describes how insurance companies denied coverage to a newborn with a minor joint problem (which corrected itself within months), cancelled the policy of a woman after she was diagnosed with lupus, and rejected an applicant because she was on a commonly-prescribed drug to manage acid reflux disease.
Most people in the U.S. get coverage through their own or a family member’s employer, and may be blissfully unaware of how challenging it can be to try and buy coverage directly from insurance companies. But even they could be one job change, divorce, or other major life event away from shopping in the individual health insurance market. Moreover, some health reform plans could lead to an expanded role for the individual market, making it more likely that any of us—major life change or not—could need the coverage offered there. This is why we all must become more aware of the last-resort, ‘Wild, Wild West’ of health insurance, and of the pricey and precarious products that are sold there. It’s no place that you’d ever want to find yourself, and its existence is one more major reason that we need comprehensive health reform that will provide high-quality and affordable health coverage for all.
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