You find yourself in need of understanding your health insurance options and are feeling overwhelmed by all the charts, provider listings, costs, benefit comparison booklets and water-cooler advice. To make matters worse, you are coming up on a hard deadline to make your choices, and you know you are going to be stuck with them for at least a year (with a very few exceptions, which, again, you don’t really understand.) All of which begs the question, “How do I make the right choices for me and my family?”

The best way to make the right choices is to understand three things; what you need, what your options are, and how those options affect what you need.

Even experts can become confused when discussing all the variables surrounding health insurance, so it is helpful to use an example to make things clear. This article will use two; Example A is a single adult male, fresh out of college at his first "real" job, healthy and with a good health history. Example B is a family of four, also fairly healthy, but experienced with taking their young children for both routine checkups for school and sports, and also late night emergency room visits with high fevers or broken limbs, not to mention the endless rounds of passing the flu bug back and forth every winter. The first question that needs to be asked is:

Why do you need health insurance? There are three main reasons: 1) Catastrophic Illness or Injury 2) Quality of Life 3) Proactive Healthcare.

Catastrophic Illness or Injury In Example A, our single young man rarely goes to the doctor; he doesn’t get sick every season like a lot of folk do, and he works out regularly and enjoys a healthy lifestyle. He could conceivably go without any insurance at all. However, he knows that if he is struck by a car crossing the street, or comes down with a deadly disease, he will be faced with doctor and hospital bills that could exceed his annual salary. As a result, he needs some kind of protection in the event of Catastrophic Illness or Injury.