CNN Money - "The truth about health care reform" - Personal Finance Perspective

Now come the more practical questions. Where will you get insurance? Will you pay more or less for it? What will reform do to your tax bill? Most important, is the new system likely to leave you with better or worse access to quality care?

The answers aren't obvious, because the new law doesn't make a single, big, revolutionary change to achieve its goal of insuring nearly all Americans. It doesn't turn doctors into government employees, as in Britain, or create a government-run universal plan like Canada's (or, for that matter, our Medicare system).

Instead, it weaves a loose safety net designed to catch people who don't get insurance at work and can't afford to buy their own, who lose their jobs, who have pre-existing conditions, or who want to create businesses and insure themselves and their workers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the law eventually 94% of legal residents will have health coverage, up from 83% today.

For most of us, not a lot will seem to change at first. In 2019, the CBO estimates, 160 million Americans will still be getting their insurance from their employers, paying about the same rates as they would have without reform. Millions more will continue to buy private insurance.

That the changes may not be obvious, however, does not subtract from their magnitude. The reform is, to politely paraphrase Vice President Joe Biden, a really big deal. "It's the first step in the direction of saying that in America, too, the government has this responsibility," says Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.