March 18, 2011 11:59 PM

Oops!

I hit the carriage return by mistake and the empty blog was published.

Anyway, on to what I was originally going to say.

You be the judge!

I don't wish to get political here, I only want to lay out the facts as I know them to be. It all revolves around our new and improved healthcare legislation that was passed last year and whose contents only now are being revealed as people have to abide by the new legislation.

A friend of ours owns and runs a beauty shop with a business partner. Not being an overly lucrative business, she watches every penny and only has had a catastrophic health plan with a huge deductible in order to minimize the policy payments. Guess what? Under our new healthcare legislation such plans are no longer allowed! Everyone must have a "comprehensive" plan. The cheapest such plan that our friend's insurance agent could supply her with more than doubled her premiums! Admittedly, she is now covered for more things but she is in good health and has made little use of her healthcare plan over the years. Now she will make little use of the new plan becuase her deductible is still fairly high even though it is half of what it used to be.

Looking for the silver lining in the new plan she asked her agent if a "free" colonoscopy was now included in the new plan. He answered yes - provided that nothing was found that would require any sort of procedure to be done to correct the issue. This would then convert the procedure to a major medical one and subject her to having to pay the deductible as part of the insurance coverage for the procedure. What's "free" about that?

Her business partner has had a lot of health issues including breast cancer and, recently, a serious fall that did extensive damage to her right arm. She asked if she could go to another insurance company as insurance companies supposedly have to accept patients with pre-existing conditions. Uh, uh! That's not until the year 2014!

Likewise, the new legislation states that the government no longer considers you to be cancer free after 5 years. It raise the timeframe to 10 years! Big deal you say! Well, if you fall into the 5 to 10 year window between 2009 and 2014, it means that you cannot switch insurance companies because you will still have a "pre-existing" condition even if your doctor feels otherwise.

Fortunately, for me, I fall into the medicare side of things which makes life a lot easier. But for the small business person watching their pennies, the pennies have now turned into many expense dollars that jeopardize their entire operation!

Believe me when I say that I am all for healthcare reform. God knows that it is more than overdue. And, having been exposed to it quite intimately over the past two and a half years, I can see room for improvement.

You can do with the above information as you wish. But is this what we all want?

I'll leave the answer up to you...

Bob