Question

1.What level of health insurance should be provided for preventable disease conditions, to provide a financial incentive for employees to change their behaviors and help prevent chronic disease and illness from occurring in the first place?

• Would it be fair if obese employees with healthy lifestyles paid the same insurance premiums as other employees with healthy weights and lifestyles? Similarly, should well-treated but chronically ill employees with healthy lifestyles pay lower health insurance premiums than healthy employees who choose to smoke, who are overweight or obese, or medically non-adherent?
• Everybody has habits that are not good for them. Why is it fair to single out smokers, the overweight and obese, and employees who fail to take their medications as prescribed?

Answer 1

The health insurance serves as a supportive system to the population in order to access the health care services. Basically many of the insurances covers the chronic or the critical illness which makes the individuals utilize their insurance for the cost attainment. Regular health plan will reimburse the medical expenses and cover the hospitalisation costs.

The type of health insurance which can be provided for the preventable disease can be a regular health plan which covers the basic reimbursement to enhance the health promotion and prevent by the vaccinations. The normal health insurance must make sure to have the complete screening in order to identify the vulnerable groups to prevent further chronic diseases.

The health insurance depends on the screening and the risk group category if an obese is for the plan of insurance with healthy life style to be categorised for the other risk comparatively to normal and must pay some extra amount for the insurance. Even the chronically well treated patients should pay extra amount than others as their hospitalisation and the critical illness could be increased.

Basically all these are the risk and no as such existing conditions influence the health and illness thus it can be fair enough to exclude all the smokers overweight as these life style also can be modified.