These plans are attractive due to their lower monthly premiums, and while proponents of these plans like the fact that they help people avoid getting costly medical procedures that might be unnecessary, the flip side of the coin is that many lower-income people aren’t simply avoiding medical procedures, they flat-out can’t afford them. In recent studies, it was shown that lower-income families were 300% more likely to skip even recommended medical procedures than higher-income families due to the costs of the procedure. The study also found that lower-income families in high deductible plans are less apt to talk to their doctor about a medical problem.

Will the Affordable Care Act help with this? It’s hoped so, by bringing more people into the health insurance pool in order to lessen the costs of insurance. While it’s questioned how much this will help skyrocketing medical costs, many see it as a step in the right direction.

He said that because in Massachusetts — where they have mandatory health care as well as health insurance exchanges — the law that brought these into effect was signed by Repbulican governor and potential presidential candidate Mitt Romney. President Obama himself said of the passage of the Affordable Care Act he thought he would find common ground with Republicans by advancing proposals that had been introduced by Republican administrations. The first states with their own health insurance exchanges, including Massachusetts and Utah, had those provisions brought into effect by Republican governors, and Governor Schwarzenegger recently signed legislation to bring them into California as well.

Since all but two states — Alaska and Minnesota — took $1 million from the federal government to help set up these exchanges, once can see that states seem to be at least embracing the idea of a health insurance exchange. Since many customers will also be subsidized by the federal government as well, hopefully this will reduce costs in the long term, but whether or not this is the case will have to wait until 2014.

The article cites several examples from small business owners in which their health insurance brokers blamed health insurance reform for the rising costs of premiums. Jay Angoff, head of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, says “It would be inaccurate and silly to blame it on the new law. To the extent that the insurance companies blame the new law for rate increases, they know better,” Angoff says. He goes onto say that the new law would only raise rates between one and two percent.

Last month, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote a letter to the health insurance industry warning them about “falsely blaming premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act”. However, Robert Zirkelbach of the insurance industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans says that some part of the rate increases can be attributed to the new law, some portions of which just took effect. The article then goes onto list more likely culprits of the increases, like healthy people cutting coverage due to a weakened economy, among other things. Overall, however, opinions are still mixed as to how much savings we’ll see from the health reform laws.

Sadly premiums aren’t the only thing going up. Co-pays for doctor visits and prescription drugs are also rising. What can you do about it? The article gives several tips. First off, pick the plan that’s right for you, with doctors and networks you trust that are convenient and experienced. Take into account how much co-payments are as well. You can also lower costs by staying healthy, keeping your risks of health problems low and therefore allowing restrictions on your plan that are in effect as long as you keep your health-risk factors low. You can also stretch your drug prescription tiers by going generic on medications as much as possible.

These are just some of the tips you can use to save money on health insurance. It’s hoped that the Affordable Care Act will help reduce costs by widening the pool and therefore putting more money into the system to help keep costs low. With that taking affect in four years, however, we need to do what we can now to reduce costs as much as possible.

This article describes how the largest for-profit health insurance companies — including Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint — all saw an increase in claim denials over the past couple of years, up to forty-nine percent overall. In 2009, for example, 257,100 could not get a health insurance plan, compared with 172,400 in 2007, according to a report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. All told, health insurance companies refused to sell health insurance plans to roughly 651,000. Over half a million people couldn’t get health insurance because these health insurance companies didn’t like their medical histories.

How anyone could see numbers like this and NOT think our health insurance and health care systems need reform is beyond this author. While the Affordable Care Act now makes it illegal to deny coverage and claims to children with pre-existing health conditions, the law doesn’t take place for adults until 2014, so many adults will have to wait until then. Likely, companies will continue this practice for as long as they can, which is just a tragedy.

The justice department was pretty pleased. “This ruling marks the first time a court has considered the merits of any challenge to this law,” said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, “and we welcome the court’s decision upholding the health care reform statute as constitutional.” This will hopefully tell lawmakers that the law is in the best interest for the people. Of course appeals are already being talked about, so we’ll see how far this ruling goes, but it’s good to see progress being made in this front.

Building health insurance exchanges will require people to build them and maintain them, servers to host them and legislation to oversee them. All of this costs money, so this infusion of cash will help states get their exchanges off the ground. Why did Alaska and Minnesota not get grants? Because they actively refused them. The governor of Minnesota ordered officials not to apply for “discretionary” federal healthcare funds. Alaska’s governor also ordered officials not to take funds, saying “We are not going to create an instrument to implement something that is unconstitutional,” in a statement. Massachusetts and Utah, however, already have exchanges in place, so they didn’t need the grant money.

The next hurdle in making these exchanges is passing the legislation needed to make them viable, which should hopefully happen next year, according to Joel Ario, who is overseeing the federal effort to make these exchanges viable. This is a first step, however, toward making that happen.

Companies can no longer impose lifetime caps on life or health insurance coverage, which can be particularly useful for people with chronic conditions that are in need of constant medical care. Next, a health insurance company can’t simply cancel your policy if they feel you’ve not given them all of the information, as they did many times in the past. Now, they need to prove that fraud must have taken place before the policy can be canceled. You also now have the right to ask for an appeal to any decision given by the health insurance companies, whereas before there were restrictions on appeals. You can even ask for an independant reviewer to oversee the claim in case the insurance companies deny you again.

Besides the lifting of these restrictions, there are also some new coverages. For example, parents can now keep their children on their health insurance policies until they are twenty-six years old as opposed to nineteen, which will help a lot of college students and recent graduates. You also now have your choice of in-network physician when joining a new health insurance company, and finally, ambulances will now take you to the nearest emergency room without worry of penalty if the hospital is out of network.

These provisions are nothing but good for customers, and will hopefully bring even more customers under the health insurance coverage umbrella. Since companies can not deny coverage, and have to keep children on policies longer, this looks like a win-win for both consumers and customers.

DestinationRx is a company that provides Medicare plan comparison and enrollment technology, and recently did a study covering the last two years to see how people enrolled in health insurance coverage. Their findings show a twenty-three percent increase in the amount of people purchasing health insurance online as opposed to over the phone. This is pretty huge, as it shows not only are people becoming more savvy about technology, but also more savvy about their options when shopping for health insurance coverage.

With changes to health insurance coming in the next few years, such as state-based exchanges and so on, it’s hoped that more and more people will make use of the facilities of the Internet to make their health insurance searches a bit easier. If this study is any indication, more and more people will use the Internet to purchase health insurance in the years to come.

According to an article on ABC NEws entitled, “‘Obamacare’ Costs More, But Covers More”, health care spending will rise over six percent on average over the next decade, which is more than those backing the Affordable Care Act say health care will cost over the next several years. The report included costs such as setting up state-based medical exchanges, bringing more people into programs like MediCare and Medicaid and much more. For example, setting up new health insurance exchanges will cost an estimated $38 million, while the increased cost of Medicaid will be $31 million. While these are high costs, the amount of insured people that these infrastructures will cover is in the millions, so one might see it as a trade off.

Whether or not the Affordable Care Act helps us curb health care spending or not, it’s hoped that the main thrust of the bill is to get more people insured, and according to the report cited here, that’s exactly what will happen. Having over ninety percent of Americans insured with health insurance will be excellent for our economy, as it will spurn spending on doctor visits, medications and much more. One can only hope that the dreams of this legislation will be fulfilled, because if not, going through all the debate and such will be debilitating.