How to get insured if you have a pre-existing health condition

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Last month a friend called to say that she had forgotten to renew her health insurance. With the break, the insurer refused to renew her cover because she had previously had cancer.

A decade ago, I often urged people to buy health insurance. Some felt that medical costs were manageable. Others opined that claims would not be paid.

That worldview has changed because medical inflation is in plain sight and millions have benefited from insurance. Today, people worry most about how to get insured if they have been diagnosed with a health condition. They shouldn't.

Insurers are now good at understanding and insuring people with adverse health. These are recorded in the policy as ‘pre-existing health conditions’. But what does this technical phrase mean? There was a time when every insurer had their own definition of ‘pre-existing condition’, some so elastic that any claim could be dismissed.

This changed in 2020, when the regulator defined this phrase and asked insurers to consistently follow its definition. It was now mandated that the disease should have been diagnosed or treated not more than three years before buying insurance. That put an end to scrambling for your childhood medical records.

It also said you should have been diagnosed with an ailment for it to be considered a pre-existing condition. No longer was it good enough to just have had the symptoms. A frequent query from those suffering chronic ailments such as hypertension, high cholesterol or thyroid disorders is: How much should I disclose to insurers? The underlying concern is that they may not be given insurance if they are completely honest.

That is not true. Insurers can factor in ailments in many ways. For moderate