Before we get into a bunch of specific posts about how insurance works and what is right for you, there are a couple of things that everyone should understand about insurance.  I'm talking about all insurance - from your health insurnace policy to a warranty on your tv from Best Buy.

There are two stories in the news that you might have heard about recently.  The first is about how hackers may have stolen millions of electronic medical records.  The second is that President Obama wants all medical records to be electronic in the next 5-10 years.

What are people saying about health insurance electronic medical record security?

As you can imagine, these two stories are combining to form "All your medical information will be stolen" stories.  Putting aside the fact that the hackers may be lying about stealing the medical records, I thought I'd talk about the relationship between these two events and what I, as a programmer in the healthcare industry, think about it.

I just read this post on CBS News.  I realize that it's hard to effectively summarize a person's
health insurance options in a three minute story, but that's no excuse for saying things that are either misleading or completely untrue.

Here are a few problems I found with the story:

Individual health insurance cost vs. group health insurance cost

They suggest that in some wacky instances, individual insurance is actually cheaper than a group policy.  There are certainly some problems with individual insurance, but it's almost always cheaper than group.