Finance and Health Insurance
In my finance class this year we did a whole chapter on health insurance (which really doesn't seem like enough information since it is something that every person thinks about or needs sometime in their life and could be essential to survival). But we did a project where we took different people and their lifestyle and looked up insurance quotes for them so that we could see just how much the decisions we make now will affect us in the future when we are adults and have to pay for our own insurance.
The first person we looked up was a 25 year old man who was 6 feet tall and weighed 190 pounds. He was a non smoker with no medical conditions. He had no children and wasn't married. His quote came out to between 35 and 95 a month.
The second guy was the same height and age with no medical conditions, non smoker and wasn't married with any children. The only difference was that he was 300 pounds instead of 190. This man's range was 65-135 a month.
Just from being overweight, this man increased his insurance payments about 30 dollars each month. That is an outrageous amount of money for something he can control. Not only does he spend a great amount of money to support his habit of smoking, he also has to pay for it with his health insurance for the rest of his life (or at least that term).
I think a lot of us don't realize that the choices we are making as teenagers and young adults are going to affect us for probably the rest of our lives. We smoke and drink and don't take care of ourselves and end up paying for it (literally) in the years to come. Not only are you hurting yourself, you are hurting your wallet. While some aspects of health insurance quotes cannot be helped, like if you had a genetic disease or an illness that was not at all caused by you, your rates would go up and although that seems unfair, it is part of the package. But staying in shape, not smoking, driving carefully, being a responsible citizen are all things that we have complete control over and are things that will determine how we live (and pay for our lives) in the years to come. Making the right choices now will benefit us in the near future.
Posted on Monday, November 24, 2008 @ 11:52 AM by Brian