Your Health Insurance Company Owes You Money
Have you received your health insurance rebate yet? No? Well, don’t hold your breath. By law, the health insurance companies have three years before they have to repay you.
Before we get into why you are owed money, let’s take a look at how insurance works. Insurance is a way of managing risk. It started centuries ago in Europe as a way to prevent trading companies from going bankrupt if their treasure ships did not make it back to port. In the modern world, we take out insurance on a lot of things such as our homes, our cars, our businesses and our health expenses.
The way that insurance works is that an insurance company estimates what they may have to pay out to cover losses and then issues a policy, the cost of which is supposed to cover the cost of that possible loss. Plus a little extra for overhead. When it comes to health insurance, the companies estimate how much they will have to pay out in medical claims and charges premiums accordingly. Plus that little extra for overhead.
Before the ACA (Affordable Care Act), health insurance companies were in the business of making money, not covering medical expenses. They charged premiums depending on how old you were, your gender, where you lived, your chronic health conditions, etc. They were free to refuse to cover anyone that they deemed had too many medical…
