With all the inflated rhetoric and distortions, it's hard to know how something like the new health care bill is going to affect people like us until its provisions start to take effect.

We paid $9600 for private health insurance last year, a policy we've had since 2005, and the premiums go up quite a bit yearly, so we've increased the deductible to $7500.

A recent letter from the insurance company informed us that our health plan is considered 'grandfathered' so we will not be able to get maintenance care such as mammograms or annual wellness checks without co-pays (aka 'expense sharing').

We will, however enjoy the benefit of no lifetime cap on our benefits. In other words, if we need expensive care over a period of time, the insurance company can't say 'you've used up your benefits.'

Also, they say they can't rescind our coverage except for outright fraud. This provision was part of the Obama plan because the insurance companies make/made a frequent practice of denying coverage because according to them we didn't inform them of all of our pre-existing conditions at the time of application. For example, if I had a heart attack, https://mybloggers.com/cgi-bin/blogapp/bnr.cgi?i=1232728085they would say 'no coverage for you because you forgot to tell us you went to a dermatologist for a mole check 7 1/2 years before you applied for this insurance.'

We have yet to see how these provisions are going to raise our annual premiums, but I'm sure they will.

I'm hoping that protections like these do not get taken away.

I can understand that the 'every American is required to have health insurance or pay a tax penalty' provision is controversial, it certainly doesn't afford my family any relief as to the cost of our coverage, and the states think it will be too costly to insure those who can't pay their own way, but I hope that it is modified, rather than the entire health care reform act thrown out.

By the way, people have asked why we don't self-insure, meaning that we do without insurance and count on being healthy, but there are a lot of good reasons why not, including a lapse in health care insurance can really cause problems getting coverage down the line: everything becomes a pre-existing condition.