Since the Affordable Health Care Act was signed, there have been some changes that made it easier for some people to get health insurance. Those with pre-existing conditions cannot be turned away simply because of the pre-existing condition. In many states, insurance companies are offering more options for parents to get health insurance for their children. Despite these changes, there are still quite a lot of people who are having difficulty getting health insurance.
My husband and I do not have the kind of employment situations that offer employer sponsored health insurance. We have tried to get health insurance but so far, we cannot find one that we could actually afford. The premiums are just too high. After my recent experience with unemployment, there isn’t anything more that we can cut out of our already meager lifestyle in order to potentially come up with the money that would allow us to pay for health insurance. We are among the many who are basically hoping that we can stay reasonably healthy until the insurance exchanges are ready, and we can find a better deal.
Even if you work for a company that will offer health insurance to it’s employees, this is not an assurance that you will be lucky enough to qualify for it. Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies that are more interested in how much money they can make than in the health of the workers whose efforts make those companies the profit they receive.
One example of this kind of situation was written about on the Huffington Post recently. Sandy Dailey, who is 53 years old, has been employed as a food service worker by Sodexo. She works between 30 and 70 hours a week, depending on which sport is in season, and what games are taking place at the Ohio State University stadium. Sodexo has chosen to keep her classified as a part time worker, perhaps because her hours fluctuate, and so, she does not qualify for the employer sponsored health insurance they offer. She makes around $9.00 per hour, and is never going to be able to afford to buy health insurance from a private insurance company.
Even if you are fortunate enough to have the money to purchase your own health insurance, outside of an employment situation, even this is no guarantee that you will actually be able to get health insurance for yourself, or for your family. Donna Dubinsky wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times about her own struggle trying to get approved for health insurance. Her first attempt at purchasing health insurance that would cover her whole family resulted in a denial. She could afford to pay for it, but the insurance company just wasn’t interested in selling it to her. If having the money won’t enable a person to be able to buy health insurance, I cannot imagine what would.
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