I’m going to assume we all know a few people who can’t get insurance for their families because one or more family-members has a pre-existing condition (no matter how minor). These folks usually need to get insurance through their employers - whether they want or need to have a job or not. It’s brutal if you’re wealthy. It’s potentially devastating if you’re not.
But fewer people are aware that insurance companies can actually take away a person’s insurance once that person becomes really sick.
The act of retroactively canceling insurance is called rescission. It happens with individual health insurance policies, where people apply for insurance on their own, not through their employers. Their application generally includes a questionnaire about their health…
The omission from the application may be deliberate, to hide a health condition that might have made the applicant ineligible for insurance. But sometimes there’s an innocent explanation: The policyholder may not have known about a health condition, or may not have thought it was relevant.
It seems clear that we need to have a very clear understanding of what these companies are about before we begin to partner with them on health care reform. It also seems clear that some stories that work their way up the blogosphere to NPR (as this story did) should be front page news during this era of potential reform.
