I will be needing to find a new health insurance provider in a few months and have started looking around. I found a questionnaire used in my state by many insurers to assess a person's health and help determine if the insurer will insure them. If the person scores 325 pts or more on the questionnaire (each health condition they have is assigned a certain number of points), they will most likely be rejected by the insurer.

I was curious to look at the points for all of the ailments I have, e.g. hypertension. It was interesting to look at mental disorders. For having the mental disorders below diagnosed at any time during the last 5 years, these are the points you get:

204 pts - Mood disorder - bipolar (e.g. cyclothymic disorder)
70 pts - Mood disorder - depression (e.g. dysthymia)
210 pts - Opioid or barbituate dependence
235 pts - Psychotic and schizophrenic disorders
32 pts - Other mental health conditions (e.g. adjustment disorders, ADHD, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, PTSD, panic disorder, phobias, seasonal affective disorder)
44 pts - Other substance abuse conditions (e.g. dependence on alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis)

I am near the 325 point cutoff so a psych diagnosis could make a difference. I am going to check with my PNP next time I see her. She has never come right out and said, "you have such and such," but she has said I have "ADHD-like symptoms" and she prescribes for me accordingly. Maybe she is very careful not to say "you have ADHD" for reasons like this--that it could haunt me later when trying to get insurance. I have never prodded her for an official diagnosis, as I haven't seen how it would help me. (I don't like being labeled.) Plus, she can prescribe for my symptoms without making a diagnosis. One thing I worry about is that on one of my insurances in the past, I could see on their forms that she had given the reason for my visit as "MDD, recurrent." Now she's never said to me that I have MDD, and that is not the reason I go to her, but I know that providers often put in a different diagnosis to insurance than what you actually have so that they can get reimbursed more easily. So I hope that this won't count against me. ADHD is only 32 points and MDD would be 70, which would put me over the 325 limit.

I am going to start being more proactive with my doctors when I see them in the next few months and make sure the correct diagnoses are in my chart and that outdated or inaccurate ones are corrected. If there is no diagnosis in the chart, that is the best (for this purpose).