How President Obama's Landmark Health Care Bill Will Help Rather Than Hurt Our Family

My disappointment with health insurance started in 1993 when my daughter was born three weeks early, and my health insurance wouldn't cover some of the charges for a longer hospital stay. I have since looked longingly at the Europeans who consider health care a basic human right rather than a privilege. I am hopeful that the new health care bill will move the U.S. in that direction.

The health care bill as it stands now will help my family, but might hurt us a little.

How the health care bill will help

I am 47 with three children. My husband's work provided Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance covers us all with $3,780 deducted from his paycheck in 2010. I take prescription medicine for inherited cholesterol and high blood pressure that costs me $800 per year. My daughter, who has ADHD, takes meds that cost about the same. Our health insurance company's mail order prescription benefit saves us money. My daughter needs weekly therapy. I have labs, an annual mammogram, and my husband and I are getting close to the age of colonoscopies. We have our issues, but believe we are an average, medically uninteresting family, like many other families.

We live in Austin, Texas, so my children can stay on our medical insurance until they are 25, assuming they are unmarried. Obama's extension to age 26 offers a slight benefit.

The health care plan makes some abhorrent insurance practices -- lifetime limits, annual limits, and pre-existing conditions -- illegal. We expect to be helped in two ways: (1) I worry that I will go out the same way both of my parents did -- lung cancer -- and that is expensive (more than $1 million for my mother in 1999), and (2) my daughter requires mental health treatment -- a pre-existing condition. With no annual limit on the number of therapy visits, insurance would cover all of her weekly visits instead of just 30 per year, saving us $2,640 each year. Both my husband and I have pre-existing conditions (neck for me, lower back for him). Once we were actually told that our health insurance would not cover prescription allergy medication for the first six months because allergies were a pre-existing condition.

I'm all for the health care law's requirement that chain restaurants display calorie info right next to each item on the menu -- that's full disclosure at the time people order. I hope it will help in the fight against obesity. It will help my family when I show my teenagers specific numbers in context when they want a "junk food" fix.

How the health care bill will hurt

After 2010, the health care plan eliminates payment for over-the-counter medicines from a flexible spending account. We will lose the tax benefit of paying the $130 with pre-tax dollars. The new cap of $2,500 should not affect us since we don't have that much in annual medical costs -- yet.

With the $2.3 billion annual fee on drug makers that increases over time, we wonder if drug makers will pass the expense to us. With health insurance becoming like a commodity where competition enters as people choose their insurer, we hope our Blue Cross / Blue Shield rate of premium increase won't accelerate.

By 2020, the Medicare prescription coverage gap or doughnut hole will close. If the health care law is still in effect when I am eligible for Medicare, I will have to pay only 25 percent once the cost of my meds hits $2,700. If the cost goes above $6,154 my cost drops to just 5 percent. If I remain on the same medications, my prescription costs might go up since my current prescription drug co-payments for some medications are less than 25 percent of the cost.

For our family, the health care bill helps more than it hurts. We will keep an eye on the health care bill with cautious optimism.

Sources:

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/03/18/section.analysis.pdf
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/03/23/health.reform.consumer.impact/index.html?hpt=T1
http://www.freep.com/article/20100323/NEWS15/100322074/What-the-health-care-bill-does-and-how-it-affects-you