Insurance

The term health insurance is generally used to describe a form of insurance that pays for medical expenses. It is sometimes used more broadly to include insurance covering disability or long-term nursing or custodial care needs. It may be provided through a government-sponsored social insurance program, or from private insurance companies.

According to the report, the number of people who have health insurance continues to drop, while employment-based coverage ? The average amount of money that employees paid for year for family coverage has doubled in the past decade to $3,354 in 2008.

Having health insurance is important for several reasons. Uninsured people receive less medical care and less timely care, they have worse health outcomes, and lack of insurance is a fiscal burden for them and their families. Moreover, the benefits of expanding coverage outweigh the costs for added services.

? There is a great and growing shortage of doctors, especially primary care doctors. Current medical school graduating classes average only 2 percent?going into primary care. So who is going to practice all the preventative medicine that IOM has in mind by extending insurance coverage?

?? The current system of health care is far too intervention-oriented. This means that we wait until people get sick and then use our insurance coverage to absorb the cost of disease-modeled intervention. id you know that over $460 billion ?

One affordable and practical type of coverage is called high deductible pet health insurance. This covers major illness, accidents and other medical needs you can't anticipate.

Those politicians get it coming and going. Man, they get a sweet deal! Campaign cash from the private insurers and a government run health insurance system to take care of their boo boos.

CAT (catastrophic) coverage is not sufficient to meet the SURE requirements, nor will hail and wind insurance, provided by private insurance carriers. The requirements specify federal crop insurance. If you carry Adjust Gross Revenue insurance, that is an acceptable alternative.

But think of it this way: If you invested on your own the savings you enjoyed over the years by going with cheaper term insurance rather than whole life, you almost surely came out significantly ahead.

Marc Siegel is an internist and associate professor of medicine at the NYU School of Medicine. He is a FOX News medical contributor and writes a health column for LA Times, where he examines TV and movies for medical accuracy.

The proportion of adults—both insured and uninsured—that spent large shares of their income on out-of-pocket medical expenses and premiums climbed between 2001 and 2007. One-third of adults spent 10 percent or more of their income on health insurance and health care, up from 21 percent in 2001 (Figure ES?1).

I'm not an expert, I'm not in the medical profession. But I have friends who are and I've heard nightmares about how people abuse the system. I also have several friends who are Canadian, and they absolutely HATE their health care system (every one of them) … so that is obviously not the solution either.

What about the poor Americans who do not make enough to afford medical insurance? Give them vouchers to buy private medical insurance and pay for the vouchers by abolishing Medicaid. In 2005, the Federal government and the states spent $316 billion on Medicaid to cover around 17 million households.

Despite its flaws, the CED proposal avoids the huge mistake of centralizing health insurance through a single government bureaucracy. The CED report correctly concludes that "Market-based universal health insurance, with individuals choosing the health plans and delivery systems that they deem best, shows great promise—much greater than any alternative.

You can most likely do better saving for retirement on your own. Whole life policies are notorious for having higher fees and administrative costs than other investment vehicles. While returns will vary, don't count on doing better than 4% to 5%, says AccuQuote's chief executive Byron Udell.