Unfortunately, if you get health insurance on your own and not from a group you might lose your insurance coverage if you get a catastrophic illness. It is legal for health insurance to annul your insurance contract; this is called rescission. Insurance companies can annul an insurance contract when the insured becomes very sick and starts costing astronomical amounts of money. As of yet, there are no laws that protect the consumers who buy insurance coverage in good faith. So many times women with breast cancer or some other type of cancer are dumped because the insurance companies don’t want to lose money. It should be noted that all states are not the same; some states will not cancel you for developing a catastrophic illness.

You may have had coverage for years and paid hundreds of dollars a month on personal health insurance, and the insurance company deposited your checks into their account every single month. You may not have been sick and never even used your insurance, and then one day you had a routine physical and found out you had breast cancer. Suddenly you are seeing a doctor regularly. You have to have costly treatments. If you begin costing a personal health insurance company too much money, they may annul your policy.

Some insurance companies will retroactively cancel a contract if the person who is insured comes down with a catastrophic illness, such as breast cancer. If you were to have group health insurance through an employer, your insurance policy would not have been canceled. You, as an individual are part of the group, and not an individual. Once you have insurance coverage through an employer, you are always covered, and no one can yank your insurance coverage out from under you.

If you filled out an application for personal health insurance, you were asked a whole long list of questions. The questions may seem a little ambiguous. If you fill out the application and fudge one little bit on a single question, the insurance company can cancel your health insurance coverage. For instance, if the question asked if you smoke, and you do, but you answered the question with a “No” answer, this could be a reason for the insurance company to dump you at a later date, when you come down with an expensive illness.

The questions for an employer based group insurance policy don’t ask very many questions at all. Many feel that the questions asked on an employer based group policy are limited because there is no need for all the questions. You are part of the group; if one person in the group is accepted, all are accepted. Group health insurance that is employer based cannot “hunt” for a reason to disqualify you from insurance coverage. On the contrary, the questions for an individual policy could ask you a whole “laundry list” of questions. Your answers to these questions can be very useful when the insurance company wants to stop paying your bills, because you are costing them too much money, and remember, insurance companies are in business to make a profit. Always be very truthful when answering questions on an insurance policy. No matter how trivial you think the question is, be honest, because if an issue comes up, and the insurance company can find a discrepancy in your answers, you can be dropped and left to face your breast cancer without insurance coverage. If a question asks you how much you weigh, don’t fudge. If you weigh 200 pounds, be honest. Don’t put a lower weight in the answer because you feel embarrassed for someone to know your weight. Telling a half-truth or fudging the truth on the insurance application could cost you your personal health insurance coverage when you need it the most.

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