I assume you meant health insurance, not life insurance.
It doesn't make much sense to me that hitting the limits would be so rare. Why have the limits in the first place if that's the case? If they didn't make a difference, then they'd just be bad propaganda for the insurer.
This random web page I looked up indicates that about 20,000 people are impacted by lifetime limits:
This is not a huge number, but it's not completely irrelevant either. The pool it draws from will exclude the elderly, the study only looks at the people with employer-provided health insurance, and the 20,000 is from the 55% of those who have lifetime limits.
So we get about 93.5 million with employer-provided insurance with lifetime caps, and that in turn gives about a 0.02% chance of hitting a cap.
Whether that qualifies as "exceedingly rare", I'm not sure.
In any case, "$100,000 hospital bill" is probably a decent substitute for most people, although the odds of being bankrupted by that are probably considerably lower among the HN readership, at least.
It doesn't make much sense to me that hitting the limits would be so rare. Why have the limits in the first place if that's the case? If they didn't make a difference, then they'd just be bad propaganda for the insurer.
This random web page I looked up indicates that about 20,000 people are impacted by lifetime limits:
http://www.pwc.com/us/en/healthcare/publications/lifetime-li...
This is not a huge number, but it's not completely irrelevant either. The pool it draws from will exclude the elderly, the study only looks at the people with employer-provided health insurance, and the 20,000 is from the 55% of those who have lifetime limits.
The Census Bureau says that about 170 million people have employer-provided health insurance: http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf
So we get about 93.5 million with employer-provided insurance with lifetime caps, and that in turn gives about a 0.02% chance of hitting a cap.
Whether that qualifies as "exceedingly rare", I'm not sure.
In any case, "$100,000 hospital bill" is probably a decent substitute for most people, although the odds of being bankrupted by that are probably considerably lower among the HN readership, at least.