It is an enormous issue. Not sure how it can be resolved.
Health insurance companies are pretty much legalized gambling. They're gambling on how long and in what kind of health you're going to live your life. They've gambled that enough people will stay healthy and do nothing but pay their bills and support the % of sick members and make the company a healthy profit.
They are not in the business of charity. They have no problem cutting you loose the first chance they legally get if you look like a bad bet. Doesn't matter how loyal you've been or how good with payments.
If it were up to them, they'd cut you loose the first chance they had once you reached a certain age or weight - my sister is bordering on morbidly obese and she could not get in with a new insurance company. She found that out during a casual questioning that asked her how tall she was and how much she weighed.
I don't know about the HIV issue or the insurance limits. Insurance runs out for many people with long-term diseases. A co-worker's wife lost her job when she got cancer because she was too sick to work. Luckily, she was on her husband's insurance policy because to try to carry her own and/or get new coverage with a pre-existing condition would be all but impossible. Well, into the year, she exceeded her maximum coverage and her insurance ended for that year. Her husband was working long hours to keep her in her pain medication.
Two months later, the economy turned and he got laid off.
What happened to them I have no idea.
The longer people live, the more toxins over a longer time people are exposed to, the more cancers proliferate.
My genetics professor adhered to the belief - and I read more and more people are coming around to his way of thinking - that cancers were a disease of old people. There was never going to be 'cure' for all of them or even a great many of them. Humans are just not meant to live as long as we are living. The longer we live, the more chance that bodily cells will copy themselves incorrectly and cancers bloom.
The recent work on the human genome and finding all these genes for the possibility of diseases is one reason people are working very hard on Privacy laws. Health insurance companies would love to know who has a gene for breast cancer and who doesn't. You may not have or ever get the disease, but if you have a
chance to get it, they have physical justification for raising your premium or not insuring you altogether.
I'm sure with gay people, men especially, insurance companies consider the men's sexual relations to be a high health risk and they don't want to pay for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if, under the table, they're lobbying against legalizing gay marriages.
It's all about money.
