Protecting The Bottom Line With Health Insurance

My mom lost her job when I was a senior in high school, and she started working from home. From that day on, we never had health insurance again as a family. When I started college, I found out that I had to have health insurance coverage. The school offered an insurance package, and even though it was somewhat expensive, I bought it anyway. Then while I was still in college, I got a full-time job working for a motorcycle dealership. Through them I purchased the health insurance I needed for school and dropped the school policy. The cost of my new insurance was about one tenth of what my old insurance cost each month.

I really needed to see a doctor for a physical. I chose a primary care physician, made an appointment, and went for a wellness check. I hadn't had a physical in years. It gave me peace of mind to know I now had a primary care physician and any time I got sick I could see the same person.

I had only been working for this company for about three months when the company started experiencing some financial problems. In order to keep from laying off employees, the company opted to drop their health insurance coverage, among other things. Once again, I found myself without health insurance. In fact, everyone I worked with was without insurance.

This created a problem for some of my co-workers. One co-worker had a pregnant wife. He had the option to purchase COBRA insurance to cover her pregnancy and the delivery, but that would cost him a few hundred dollars a month. If he and his wife wanted insurance to cover the whole family for doctor visits, prescriptions, accidents, and everything else, the cost would have been 2-3 times higher. He couldn't afford that, so he had to find another job where he could get insurance for his whole family. Unfortunately, the new company he went to work for didn't offer an HMO, which would have covered his wife's pregnancy. So he had to purchase the COBRA insurance and pay premiums from his paycheck for other health insurance.

Since I still needed health insurance coverage for school, I had to buy a policy right away. Fortunately, I found a policy that was much cheaper than what I had been buying from school, and it was just as good. I wasn't limited to only seeing a doctor when I was sick; I could also have wellness checkups. Hospital and catastrophic illness coverage was excellent as well.

Even though my mom didn't have health insurance for us before I went into college, I never realized what it meant to be without it. It must have been stressful for my mom knowing that if one of us ended up in the hospital, she would have to pay all of the bills herself. As for my co-workers, not only did they all loose their insurance, some of them even lost their jobs and their peace of mind.