Some common complaints about private health insurance include:

1) Insurance companies do not announce their health insurance premiums more than a year in advance. This means that, if one becomes ill, he or she may find that his premiums have greatly increased. This largely defeats the purpose of having insurance in the eyes of many.

2) If insurance companies try to charge different people different amounts based on their own personal health, people will feel they are unfairly treated. Some states require that insurance companies cover all who apply at the same cost, or that rates vary only by age of the insured; this rule has the effect that healthy people subsidize sick ones, and thus frequently only those in poor health buy insurance, making the premiums very expensive[citation needed].

3) When a claim is made, particularly for a sizeable amount, it may be deemed in the best interest of the insurance company to use paperwork and bureaucracy to attempt to avoid payment of the claim or, at a minimum, greatly delay it. Some percentage of insureds will simply give up, leading to lower costs for the insurance company[citation needed].

4) Health insurance is often only widely available at a reasonable cost through an employer-sponsored group plan. This means that unemployed individuals and self-employed individuals are at a disadvantage[citation needed].

5) Employers can write some or all of their employee health insurance premiums off of their taxable income whereas traditionally individuals have had to pay taxes on income used to fund health insurance. This reduces the employee's bargaining power in negotiating service with the insurance provider and also increases their dependence on the employer. In the U.S., COBRA and more recent legislation has been passed in an attempt to address the latter concern, and full tax deductibility for health insurance premiums paid by the self-employed has recently been passed by Congress as well[citation needed].

6) Experimental treatments are generally not covered. This practice is especially criticized by those who have already tried, and not benefited from, all "standard" medical treatments for their condition. It also leads to many insurers claiming or attempting to claim that procedures are still "experimental" well after they have become standard medical practice in many instances. (This phenomenon was especially seen after organ transplants, particularly kidney transplants, first became standard medical practice, due to the tremendous costs associated with this procedure and other organ transplantation.)[citation needed]

7) The Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) type of health insurance plan has been criticized for excessive cost-cutting policies. The least justifiable of these efforts, according to critics, is having accountants or other administrators essentially making medical decisions for customers by deciding which types of medical treatment will be covered and which will not[citation needed].

8) As the health care recipient is not directly involved in payment of health care services and products, they are less likely to scrutinize or negotiate the costs of the health care received. To care providers, insured care recipients are essentially seen as customers with relatively limitless financial resources who don't look at prices. The health care company has few popular and many unpopular ways of controlling this market force. In response to this, many insurers have implemented a program of bill review in which insureds are allowed to challenge items on a bill (particularly an inpatient hospital bill) as being for goods or services not received; if this is proven to be the case, the insured is awarded with a percentage of the amount that the insurer would have otherwise paid for this disputed item or items, usually 25% or occasionally even 50%, with a ceiling so that the insured will not truly become wealthy from this procedure.

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