Hi, it's Beth here for another Pantsuit primer. Let's talk about the Affordable Care Act.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23rd of 2010

and this law has the biggest impact on health care since Medicare and Medicaid laws were passed

in the 1960s. I'm going to try to do an overview of the law for you, but you need to know that the

law is 2700 pages long and that there are nearly 20,000 additional pages of regulations implementing the

law, so I'm not going to hit everything. I also want to tell you that I have an opinion about the

Affordable Care Act kind of a strong one. I'm going to try to check that at the door because the

purpose of our primer episodes is just to give you some basic information, not to debate the

pros and cons. Sarah and I will do that in Tuesday's episode. So if you already know a lot about the

Affordable Care Act, just turn this one off, pop it on Tuesday and we'll chat with you then.

If you're looking for some more information, I'm going to try to give that to you. Since I know that

we have a number of listeners who are high school and college students, I want to take just a

quick second to talk about what insurance is because I don't know that we really focus on this

enough, especially before we're paying for insurance. So think of insurance like paying a fee to

hedge your risks. When you pay a premium to an insurer, it's you're buying a product and that

product is risk management. And then you start cost sharing with your insurance company. And so

that happens under the terms of whatever product you bought. Your product is like a little contract

between you and the insurer. So in the context of healthcare, I pay a premium and then there's a

list that says how we're going to allocate my risk if I need medical services. Maybe my insurance

company says it's going to pay for my annual physical completely. I don't have to pay for that at all.

That's good for the insurance company, right? The insurance company wants me to know what's going

on with me and catch it early and treat it because hopefully that leads to less expensive healthcare

...