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If you really want affordable health insurance then you'd do well to take a peep into the minds of those who determine what policy holders pay as premiums. Being equipped with this kind of information will help you take steps that will guarantee big savings...

To position yourself better for cheaper rates, you need to understand how insurers compute your rate. Being equipped with this kind of information will help you take steps that will guarantee big savings...

The world of insurance is all about risk management. The point is that in providing coverage or managing other people's risk, the must NOT put themselves at risk. The truth is they go beyond that: They ensure they turn out good profit doing this. So how do they go about doing this for health insurance prospects?

They use the very same factors that are either indicators of, or pointers to, poor health or a higher likelihood of early death. Things like your Body Mass Index, your cholesterol level, your general lifestyle, your medical history and whether you use tobacco. They don't fail to also check things like your family health history, if you have a pre-existing condition, if you're diabetic and others.

If you check each of the factors listed above, you'll agree with me that they can help determine how healthy a person is today and the likelihood of illness in the near future.

Insurers go ahead to group the general population into categories. Some are labelled as "preferred" while others might be called "high risk". These are all functions of how risky they find you. It gets even more interesting...

If you pick ten people randomly, each of them will check differently to the various indicators listed earlier in this article. To ensure they don't price a low risk too high and so lose them to competition or price a high risk too low and so lose money, they do more detailed computing.

Each insurer gives a certain weighting to each of the various factors. Insurers give these weightings or relevancy scores based on their unique experience and expertise. This difference is scoring leads to a big difference in risks associated with different profiles. This eventual makes their end results even more different bearing in mind that there are a good number of factors considered in the computation.

Now get thinking...

If you want the cheapest health insurance and there are up to 180 insurance providers to choose from, how do you ascertain who'd have the most affordable rate (Or more correctly, plan)?

Important NOTE: By law, providers cannot give lower rates for a given health plan. Be that as it may, to ensure they have appropriate rates for for various risk groups (and so stay competitive and profitable) they instead create very many assorted plans for these very specific profiles. At the moment, the US has in excess of 10,000 such plans for you to choose from. The same thing as giving different rates for, say, 10 plans if you ask me -- Only more confusing ).

You'd have to obtain a good number of quotes, compare plans and then buy whichever serves your best interest.

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