Recently my employer decided to explore other options for health insurance for its employees. To do this, every employee had to complete an insurance application.
Now, this application wasn’t short and sweet. In fact, it was the same type of application that one has to complete when signing up for an already established insurer of a company. I was so annoyed by the prospect of having to fill out my entire health history, and that of each family member, just for a quote, that I refused to complete the 2nd part of the application where I had to supply dates and the current status of certain items.
Well, that got thrown back in my face. Not by my employer, but by the company from which the group insurance quote was being sought. They told my employer that if I refused to complete the application, the quote they would give would be the highest and not based on a group rate. In other words, Dee’s application was holding up the process.
How bogus!
I was faced, then, with a dilemma: Continue to refuse to supply the information and thereby prevent a possible lower quote from an insurance company for the rest of my colleagues or supply the information (supposedly protected by HIPAA) and now let a company that won’t necessarily be our new insurance company have all my sensitive information?
Begrudgingly, I chose the latter of the two options.
This is just another example of how our health care system controls everything out our health care decisions. Citizens of the U.S. are definitely in a trap – and thus the large numbers of them going without insurance, mostly not by choice.
Something’s gotta change.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 