United American is one of two different, bad, responses you get if you fill out a "request for health insurance quote" on the web.
UA is at least insurance, but extremely poor, and in fact will cost you more money than it could pay in benefits.
They offer to pay only for In patient hospital stays some token amount of 1-200 dollars a day, nothing else for an overnight stay.
Un-discounted charges at hospitals average 15-20 times that amount for a stay, and worse a patient would get a better rate for "no-insurance" and working to pay off the stay, then having the provider "bill" the insurance.
Example standard cost of an overnight stay in an observation unit gross charge $2,980
If you used UA, and IF UA paid the bill for such a stay they would send the hospital $100, and the patient would be on the hook $2,380 out of pocket; after the provider gave a discount to an accepted local fee schedule, amounts are estimates from a 20 year professional of Health care finance and 9 year financial professional with major health insurance companies. (for this benefit you pay them a 100 a month btw, and surgery coverage hah, less than 1 in 100 patients has an inpatient surgical procedure for any hospital stay)
The "no insurance" standard write off by the hospital with less negotiation would be out of pocket $1,200.
Why? Do things like this happen, if you look around and ask the right people in patient finance/admissions / medical clinics billing organizations (which is a long frustrating ordeal of being passed off from one to another) you will find that frequently providers charge more for the hassle of going through insurance than their cash price. Not all providers have a cash/no insurance price.
In short, the math of how insurance companies work is you pay a monthly amount, they pay the agent, the office, the boss, the other printing and adminstrative charges (per member per month, its the insurance bizz talk) and then the insurance company invest in a pool to fund your charges, and you guessed it I would bet the "risk" financed by my monthly fee is probably about a dollar a month given the age of my wife and I.
Of course UA might tell you its major medical coverage but the benefits they pay, were exceed by providers in the 1960's!
The national average for ICU Intensive care unit charges is a $100 and hour, on top of a avg room charge of $350 per day, and then there are staffing, labs, medications, Oh and remember you still need to pay the doctor!
I had two non surgical, medication and monitoring visits in the last 40 years of my life, the total bill for the 2 day stay was 25K the full insurance I had the paid the hospital $2,768. Two years later, new employer new plan, a three day stay was charged out of $35,986 after discounts the regular health insurer paid the hospital in full $3,121 including physician fees!
My agent and assistant are nice people, they didn't mislead us but, they obviously forgot when I told them I knew a few things about the system and knew a little about the insurance biz!
For any manager or higher up in UA, tell me you used the same insurance policy you peddle for you own coverage! And then back it up with some numbers.
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