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:

    As they move into sharing parenting, men often are apprentices to women because they are not yet as skilled in child care. Mothers have to be willing to teach fathers—both by stepping in and showing and by stepping back and letting them learn.
    —Nancy Press Hawley. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)

    Women hock their jewels and their husbands’ insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)