Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw9away6 | Hacker News Reader

This will get used against you to deny insurance coverage. Not to help anyone.

In the United States, insurance plans are prohibited from excluding people based on pre-existing conditions since 2014.

I suppose if you tried to get certain types of long-term care insurance or life insurance and failed to disclose this you'd be at risk of losing the policy.

But nobody should be avoiding screenings or care for fear of losing health coverage for pre-existing conditions. That stopped being true almost a decade ago.

But does "Will likely develop a disease in a few years" count as a pre-existing condition?

This is true. The net effect is you can be denied coverage.

They don't explain this to you when you get the check.

I know this used to be true, but is it still true post Obamacare?

You can not be denied health insurance or charged more because of pre-existing conditions under the affordable care act.

Other things such as life insurance is a very different story.

In that case this should be made illegal to use diagnosis results in this way. Insurances are not supposed to be in the business of refusing coverage.

I believe Obamacare did fix this in the US, but at the trade off of requiring people to hold health insurance at all times. The thinking was otherwise people would just only get insurance when they got supper sick. The republicans chipped away at that requirement (it was one of the least popular parts of the bill) and I think removing it didn’t actually cause the insurance market to collapse which everyone thought it would, but I’m not clear on exactly why? Generally requiring insurance to not charge extra when people only buy it when they need the insurance is doomed

There’s no such qualifier for any heath insurance you get after 2010.

No denying you or charging you more because of a pre-existing condition.

Health no but life yes

It’s better to not screen for conditions with no treatment

You could apply this kind of thinking to virtually any medical advance. Appropriate regulation would solve the problem.

Unless you live in Europe good luck with that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com