Medical Underwriting - Health Insurance Underwriting

Health Insurance Underwriting

Health insurance underwriting is the process that a health insurer uses to encourage potential health risks in its pool of insured people against potential costs of providing coverage. To conduct medical underwriting, an insurer asks people who apply for coverage (typically people applying for individual or family coverage) about pre-existing medical conditions. In most U.S. states, insurance companies are allowed to ask questions about a person's medical history in order to decide whom to offer coverage, whom to deny and if additional charges should apply to individually purchased coverage.

While most discussions of medical underwriting in health insurance center around medical expense insurance, similar considerations apply for other forms of individually purchased health insurance, such as disability income and long-term care insurance.

Read more about this topic:  Medical Underwriting

Famous quotes containing the words health and/or insurance:

    ...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.
    Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)

    In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.”
    Emma Goldman (1869–1940)