Pre-Existing Medical Conditions: Your Individual Health Insurance Options

For those of us with any sort of pre-existing medical condition, too young to qualify for Medicare Benefits, doing just a little too well to qualify for a Medicaid Plan, too broke to afford a steep out-of-pocket privately sponsored health care premium or too "self-employed" to be a participant in an affordably-priced group sponsored medical program, today's health-insurance marketplace can seem a bit daunting and more than a little inaccessible.

None of the factors listed above has the capability to keep consumers from getting health insurance coverage through one of the nation's major indemnity carriers in and of itself, they do work to hamper the efforts of sixteen million or so of us searching for a private health policy to buy into that won't be prohibitively expensive.

The need to buy into a health insurance plan of our own makes us the proverbial "unwanted children" of the medical insurance marketplace . . . The employees of smaller firms unable or unwilling to offer healthcare benefits, the self-employed, those of us who are lingering between jobs, recently divorced or widowed individuals whose situation has lost them their spouse's group health coverage, young adults who've moving or being moved off of their parents' medical policies or those of us who've decided to retire early and thereby lose our group health coverage before turning sixty-five and becoming eligible for Medicare . . . are all faced with the need to buy into an individual or family policy and entering into a peril-fraught marketplace wherein both good advice and reasonable prices can be scarce.

There are fewer and fewer major health insurers interested in offering their services to individuals such as those described above, and their reasons for that are fairly straightforward.