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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as the health reform bill will impact almost every American. One of the most important ways it will affect individual health insurance is that insurance companies will not be permitted to deny insurance to those with preexisting illnesses. Another important affect is that all Americans will be required to hold insurance. Insurance companies will be prohibited from placing annual and lifetime limits on coverage.

Group health exchanges may also help to reduce the cost of insurance plans, giving individuals the buying power of large companies. You will be able to purchase insurance through a state exchange from 2014. The exchanges have yet to be formed, but the intended goal is to provide more affordable and subsidized individual plans. The Obama effects on individual health insurance addresses the biggest weaknesses in the individual health insurance market.

Easy To Insure Me As the reform bill was passed policy rates were climbing. A report revealed that members of the middle class were losing health insurance faster than any other income group.

Those who missed the Government provided safety net because of their income were thrown on the mercies of the individual market. Here, insurers have been denied coverage based on preexisting conditions and are vulnerable to charges of high and ever increasing premiums. The limits insurers placed on who gets coverage is one of the three major problems that needed to be addressed in the individual market. The other two are the affordability and whether the policy would pay for what is needed when the insured gets sick.

HEALTH TIPS

A study found that excluded conditions varied by insurer. In a 2001 study by the Georgetown Health Policy Institute, researchers 37 percent of applications were rejected. There were insurers who would turn you down if you had hay fever. The public thus was a victim of a roulette insurance market. How easy is it for individuals to wade their way through the market to insurers who would cover them is a question. Although federal law requires insurers to sell policies to certain people who lose group coverage, including those who lost their jobs due to lay offs; but places no limits on what an insurer can charge.

In February 2010, Connecticut announced that health premiums for individual medical plans rose in price by 20 percent over in 2009. In this void have stepped some states in varying degrees. Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Vermont required insurers to sell individual policies to everyone, irrespective of their health. Washington state required insurers to take individuals with some health problems. While, Iowa required insurers to cover preexisting conditions in new applicants, if they had insurance previously for those conditions and did not let the insurance lapse.