Posts Tagged medical ins
Nicotine Testing and Insurance
The life expectancy of a smoker is about 10 years less than a non-smoker on average. This stark finding was published in the British Medical Journal a few years ago. Over time various clinical research has proven that smoking can cause many health issues like heart disease, lung cancer, COPD and more. This is exactly why health insurance and life insurance companies make it a point to charge a higher premium for those who are confirmed as smokers.
Nicotine testing is used by insurance companies to test whether the claims made in the application form are correct or not. Therefore nicotine testing is very much a part of the medical screening process that is conducted to finalize the premium that shall be charged. The premium that a non-smoker can expect to pay for a life insurance plan or a health plan is significantly lower than the amount that a smoker will need to pay.
While a tobacco test can be carried out by using a blood sample, a urine sample or a saliva sample, the one test that can detect nicotine in the system with the longest detection period is the hair drug test. The issue is that a hair follicle test for nicotine testing is fairly expensive and therefore is not feasible for testing all those who apply for a life insurance plan or for medical insurance.
In many cases, financial institutions that sell life insurance and health plans use a urine test to determine whether the applicant is a smoker or not. This is essentially a cotinine test that determines the level of cotinine, a by-product of nicotine being processed in the body. A cotinine test can detect nicotine up to 4 days after use in the human system.
If you have had a casual cigarette and want to ensure that a nicotine test does not give you away resulting in a high premium, you should consider checking your nicotine levels at home before you agree for a medical test. A home nicotine test can ensure that you are completely clean and ready for the test. Most home nicotine testing requires a small sample of urine and takes less than 5 minutes for results to appear. The home test is based on the standard cut off level of 200 ng/ml.
The tobacco test conducted at home is not very expensive and therefore can be used without feeling the pinch of losing a lot of money. In any case, the reduction that you can expect in the premium shall more than justify the amount spent on the home nicotine test.
The product can detect any kind of tobacco and can be used to detect pipe tobacco, cigars, cigarettes and even smokeless tobacco. So if you really want to come out clean during the medical checkups organized by insurance companies, take the home nicotine test to ensure that the nicotine has actually run out of the system, and that your efforts to quit will indeed be rewarded.
Although we certainly would not recommend lying to insurance companies on your application, there is no reason why you should feel that you are doing something wrong or get charged a higher premium if you are a casual smoker. An insurance company may try and squeeze a higher premium from you even if you smoke a single cigarette in a year. Avoid coincidences where the medical test date coincides with a casual cigarette that you may have smoked with nicotine testing at home.
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Take Advantage of Group Medical Insurance Rates
Many health insurance companies offer group medical insurance rates at a significant discount compared to individual rates. The insurance companies can give groups a better deal on premiums because the risk to the insurance company is spread over a wider range of people. Some of those people will need medical treatment and file claims, while others in the group will be healthy and never use their insurance. That means that the insurance company can charge everyone a little less because the healthy group members essentially cover the ill ones.
Small business owners are not legally required to offer health insurance to their employees. However, they may find that the benefits of offering good medical insurance far outweigh the costs. If employees are covered, they are more likely to be healthy and come to work more often. With the benefit if lower group medical insurance rates compared to individual rates, employees will tend to take advantage of that discount and purchase coverage as a part of the group.
Medical insurance through a small business group also offers some security for people who suffer from chronic illnesses. By law, a health insurance company is required to cover all eligible employees in a small business insurance plan. There are stipulations and waiting periods built in to protect the insurance companies, but in general after the first year of employment an employee is legally granted comprehensive health insurance as a member of a small business group.
Group medical insurance rates have been on the rise recently, but they are still a far better deal than anything you can find for an individual. The insurance companies that offer group rates are also more trustworthy than some of the discount insurance you will find for individuals. Group medical insurance is an investment that will pay off for the employer and employee in the long run.
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Help Yourself Find Cheap Health Insurance Companies in Arizona
If you talk to most Arizona residents about cheap health insurance companies they’ll look at you as if you’re crazy. The very idea of cheap health insurance seems ludicrous to most people, especially when more than 50% of all Arizona residents who have health insurance report that they can barely afford to pay the premiums as it is. Fortunately there are several things which most people fail to take into consideration that could reduce the cost of their health insurance significantly.
A very simple thing that most people overlook is to pay their health insurance premium automatically every month from their checking or savings account. If your insurance company doesn’t have to mail you an expensive bill every month they pass the savings along to you.
If you don’t see your doctor often during a normal year, then why not increase your co-payment from the standard 25% to 50%? It will save you around 20% a month on the cost of your premium and should save you money in the long run.
What about your deductible? Can you afford to increase it? Obviously this is a question that you’ll have to consider carefully, but the higher your yearly deductible the lower your monthly premium payment is going to be.
If you’re serious about reducing the cost of your health insurance then you are going to have to be serious about not smoking or using chew or any other tobacco product. You simply will NOT get the cheapest price for health insurance if you smoke or use chew. Period.
If the cost of health insurance is still too high you might consider opening a Health Savings Account, especially if you are generally healthy. A Health Savings Account, also known as an HSA is a special savings account that you fund with cheap tax-free dollars. The catch is that you can only use the money in your HSA to pay for your medical needs during the year. Because the money in your HSA is tax-free it is equivalent to saving approximately 25% on your health needs.
Another advantage to an HSA is that if you do not use all of the money in your account in a given year then the balance rolls over into the next year, which would allow you, over time, to build up a nice tax-free nest egg.
As part of your HSA account you will be required to buy a very low-cost high-deductible health insurance policy. These cheap health insurance policies have a deductible so high that in a normal year they will not pay even a penny toward any of your health care needs – that’s what your tax-free savings account is for.
What these cheap insurance policies do is they act as a safety net to shield your life savings and even your home itself from an unexpected catastrophic accident or illness which results in enormous medical bills which otherwise could have wiped out everything you own.
There is one last thing you can do that will save you a bundle on your health insurance, and that’s to buy your policy online. In today’s world you would have to be crazy not to buy your medical insurance online since online insurance sellers offer their products at such deep discounts.
One of the tricks to finding the most affordable policy online is to make sure that you check out the prices on several different health insurance price comparison websites rather than relying on the results that you find from just one site.
But once you’ve made all of your comparisons then the fun really begins as you simply choose the cheapest health insurance company in Arizona and know that you are saving a ton of money every year while still getting the health insurance that you and your family need.
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