Health insurance. Those words were once so reassuring. Even if health insurance could not insure your good health, you could at least count on its paying most, if not all, of the expenses of your medical care, and at a reasonable cost to you. But nowadays the health safety net offers far less reassurance—even for the lucky people who have employer-provided health insurance or for those who pay handsomely for a private plan.
This article is the first in a series clarifying the increasingly confusing world of health insurance. Future articles will explain the alphabet soup of POS, EOB, HMO, and PPO as well as the meaning of “deductibles” and “co-pays,” how to deal with denials of claims and finding your way through the Medicare maze.
