Health care costs and health care premiums are becoming unaffordable. Those who aren’t in an employer-paid plan are experiencing double digit percentage increases each year. The result is millions of Americans are uninsured. One solution is to take a policy with a high deductible. The deductible is the annual out-of-pocket cost for medical care before insurance starts paying the bills. A high deductible will save premium dollars and will allow you to have catastrophic coverage to protect your assets. You would need to self-insure for things like doctor visits and prescriptions. Insurance never was meant to pay every bill.

Another solution is to do what you can to improve your health and avoid claims. Just as regular maintenance on your home will do much to keep your home safer and suffer less damage, regular maintenance on yourself will help make high deductible health insurance work.

If you’re a smoker, your health insurance premium is rated up approximately 45 percent. The height and weight tables are rather strict, so rate-ups are very common and can be as high as 100 percent before coverage is declined. Tobacco use and being overweight—as well as lack of exercise, elevated cholesterol, and high blood pressure—are the main risk factors for so many diseases, and they can all be controlled. Take a serious look at your family health history; that’s one risk factor you can’t control, but preventive measures before symptoms appear can help keep history from repeating itself.

Smoking and being overweight are the two prone to claims of quick and easy cures. While there are some very successful products that have helped people quit smoking, for the time being there is nothing on the market that can really make fat disappear. The only thing guaranteed to work is our own self-determination. It’s time we each become the gatekeepers of our health. There’s no magic bullet; rather, we must bite the bullet to make improvements in our health, so we can dodge the bullet. TPW