Factors Affecting Your Health Insurance Premiums

There are actually many factors that can significantly affect your health insurance premiums and while many people fail to realize this one of the biggest factors that is affecting the cost of health care in America these days is actually the number of uninsured people in this country and the amount that they leave behind in unpaid medical bills each year. This is by far one of the biggest factors affecting the cost of health care across the board.

Those people who are covered by medical insurance feel that those who don't have it need to tend for themselves. They don't consider it their problem to solve. They are the fortunate ones that have coverage, visits doctors when they are sick and receive medications to abate their illness. Little do they know that when the uninsured do go to the doctors they can't pay their bills and therefore this will cause doctors to raise their prices and the cost of medical premiums to rise.

Those who are living without health insurance tend to wait on their health issues until they become a much bigger health crisis and as a result their bills are bigger and since they don't have health insurance and most don't have the money to pay these bills, they tend to go unpaid for long periods of time and some simply go unpaid indefinitely. But that shouldn't be our concern, right?

Well, let's face the facts for a minute. The hospital has now paid for care for that individual and has essentially provided that care for free if they are not reimbursed. Now they have experienced a loss for those fees and in order to recoup them they raise the cost of their services to compensate for those losses, which not only drives your out of pocket expenses up but also the cost of your health insurance premiums as well. Just as with those who steal from a store and drive up the prices so do those with unpaid medical bills drive up your costs in the health care industry.

It's important to understand that the hope with the new health care reform was to mandate everyone to have insurance thus eliminating the amount of unpaid bills. Whether or not this will correct the problem, one will have to wait and see. If this issue could be resolved perhaps we wouldn't see premiums escalate.