The health insurance factor – what a bummer!

When you are diagnosed with diabetes, I sincerely hope that you have excellent medical insurance. But at the same time, you may become very frustrated with your medical insurance, medicare, or for that matter any regulatory agency that controls how you treat your diabetes.

It is now foreseen that insurance is becoming much more expensive under the recently passed Obama health care program. Before the year 2014 when most parts of the program will be in full force, our medical health insurance costs are expected to double and possibly more. Many are already seeing a 21 percent or greater increase in medical health insurance premiums. While there are some lesser premium increases, most of these are for less than full coverage plans.

With hefty Medicare and Medicaid planned cuts, plus cuts to the VA budget for health care, we are going to be in a world of poor health care by 2014. Many, if not most employers will opt to pay the small fine per employee for not having health insurance rather that the high costs of medical insurance premiums. Even employers already dipping into employee's pockets to cut their rising medical insurance costs will also cancel their plans.

Insurance companies are funding more studies this year and the next few years looking for anything that they can use to reduce payouts. Those of us with type 2 diabetes that are not on insulin may have testing completely taken off the table. Medicare and medicaid have already limited your testing to two times a day and I have seen insurance companies enforcing this limit as well. While some are finding temporary relief, many will be severely restricted in what diabetes supplies are insurance reimbursed in the coming years.

While insurance companies are reaping larger profits and paying their executives millions in compensation, they are striving to reduce payouts for claims where ever they can find reasons to do so. So for those of us with diabetes, do not be surprised if we are faced with ever increasing costs. This will range from prescriptions, office visits, to medical insurance premiums.

If the above does not motivate you to bring your diabetes under strict control, then expect to pay the price. You know the insurance companies will be looking to cut their expenses at your expense.

While I am not in total agreement with the following blogger, he expresses some views that are well placed and deserve some thought. There is still much that needs exposure in the Obama Health Care program. Not all the program is bad in and of itself, but much still needs to be laid out for the public to measure the good parts and discover some of the horrific parts that will stifle medical care and development of better health care.