How to Find the Best Health Insurance Plan for You

How to Find the Best Health Insurance Plan for You. Welcome to Best Health Insurance Plans, our effort to make plan-shopping easier for people who need to get their own individual or family coverage directly from an insurer or broker. To rate health plans marketed directly to individuals and families, U.S. News tapped into a newly available federal database containing information provided by hundreds of insurance companies about thousands of individual plans. We have distilled the data and put it into an easy-to-use online tool that can help you pick the plan that's right for you and your family by comparing it with others on a range of costs and covered services.

We measured each plan's coverage against 10 categories of health benefits deemed essential by such leading institutions as the Institute of Medicine and adopted as part of the Affordable Care Act, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in July. You can think of Best Health Insurance Plans as a national prototype for the state health insurance exchanges that are scheduled to go into effect in 2014 under the Affordable Care Act. Our goal is to help you obtain affordable coverage for the services you need and limit your exposure to expenses you can't anticipate. Read more in our buyers guide.

Here's how to use this site:

Step 1. Make sure the information is relevant to you. We only provide information on plans sold by health insurers to individuals and families. You should use our ratings if you're self-employed or working for a firm that doesn't offer health plans, if you don't belong to organizations that offer health coverage to their members, and if you're not eligible for Medicaid or Medicare coverage.

Step 2. Decide how you want to browse the plans. We've provided several entry points for the health plan ratings. You can go right to a personalized search by filling in the blanks in the blue box near the top of this page. Or if you want a broad panorama of available plans, you can view ratings for plans in your state. Again, start at this page.

Step 3. Scan our listing of plans or your search results. We've rated plans for individuals and families based on scope of coverage, giving five stars to plans that cover the broadest range of essential benefits: prescriptions, emergency care, hospital care, outpatient care, mental health, substance abuse, maternity, rehabilitation and habilitation, and certain kinds of pediatric care. These ratings give you an at-a-glance assessment of the completeness of a plan's benefits. We also give plans higher marks if they have fewer hidden costs. For instance, some plans exclude certain charges from the stated out-of-pocket limit, meaning that you could very well pay much more than you might think.

Step 4. Try to anticipate the impact of a worst-case scenario. The whole point of health insurance is to protect against the kinds of crushing medical costs that can dump families into bankruptcy. Charges for knee replacement can easily top $40,000; for an uncomplicated heart bypass operation, $100,000. When choosing any plan, consider the extent to which it covers the high costs of major procedures and catastropic illnesses that might require a long hospital stay. Your medical needs are unique, as is your tolerance for risk and your budget. U.S. News & World Report's Best Health Insurance Plans can help you deal with the sheer number of health care plans available, and help you make an informed buying decision.

Step 5. Consider a plan's potential total cost—monthly premium plus deductibles, copayment, and coinsurance. We didn't factor premium amounts into our star ratings. Instead, you can quickly see how a plan's premium stacks up against that of other plans—we've calculated each plan's real-world monthly premiums for an average person and put the plan's premium on a scale of one to five dollar signs from lowest- to highest-cost. Our star ratings for coverage include an assessment of each plan's cost-sharing provisions—how much you pay out of pocket through copays (flat dollar amounts) and coinsurance (percentages of charges). Coinsurance can be especially costly, because it can range up to 50 percent or more of the price of an expensive procedure.

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Sarah Michelle Prinze has baby girl

Sarah Michelle Prinze has baby girl . Sarah Michelle Prinze and husband Freddie Prinze Jr. are parents, PEOPLE has learned exclusively.
Freddie Prinze Jr. and his wife Sarah Michelle Prinze are first time parents.

The couple "welcomed their daughter Charlotte Grace Prinze on Saturday, Sept. 19," said a rep for the actress. "The family is over the moon."

This is the first child for the couple, who revealed that they were expecting back in April.

Freddie Prinze Jr. will star on the upcoming season of "24."

Sarah Michelle - whom Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-star Michelle Trachtenberg says will make a great mom - recently changed her last name from Gellar to Prinze.
See how Sarah Michelle Prinze stayed fit during her pregnancy.

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Taliban suspected of stockpiling 'missing' Afghan opium

Taliban suspected of stockpiling 'missing' Afghan opium. Enough Afghan opium to supply world demand for two years has effectively gone missing, with the Taliban suspected of stockpiling supplies in a bid to corner the market, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has revealed.
Pakistani customs officials destroy contraband narcotics on the border with Afghanistan.

Pakistani customs officials destroy contraband narcotics on the border with Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is the world's leading narcotics supplier. Earlier this month, a U.N. study revealed Afghanistan's opium production had dropped dramatically this year partly because of new aggressive drug-fighting tactics in the country.

According to the UNODC report, production dipped by 10 percent this year while cultivation fell by 22 percent.

However, a senior U.N. spokesman warned that this positive news should be treated with caution.

"We figure the world needs around 4,000 tons of opium a year for licit and illicit purposes," Walter Kemp of the UNODC told CNN. Has enough empasis been placed on drug trafficking?

"But this year around 6,900 tons was produced, with 7,700 tons delivered last year and more than 8,500 the year before that. Map showing where Afghan opium is going »

"So if the world only needs around 4,000 tons of opium and a further 1,000 is seized, where is the rest of it going?"

According to Kemp, world demand for opium remains stable yet prices are not crashing, which suggests a large amount of opium is being withheld from the market.

"Our guess is that around 12,000 tons of opium has been stockpiled somewhere -- not all in one place but in and around Afghanistan," he added. "So while production might be coming down -- mostly because of market reasons -- there's still a lot of product around to satisfy demand for about two years."

It is unclear exactly who is responsible for this but there's growing evidence, according to the U.N., that the Taliban are becoming increasingly involved in the industry and could be sitting on huge stockpiles of opium to use as credit for financing their activities.

"Farmers will be keeping small amounts back as credit for things such as a dowry or buying livestock," said Kemp. "But they won't have the means to store supplies in the kind of quantities we're talking about here.

"It's probably in the hands of people with the ability to store it underground and to keep people away from it through corruption or force."

Hakan Demirbuken, a research expert on the U.N.'s Afghan Opium Trade Program, said Taliban involvement in the drugs trade is not limited to taxing Afghan opium farmers and traders in return for their "protection."

He told CNN: "Last year we estimated that Afghan poppy farmers earned around $730 million, while traders who take the product on to the border earned around $3.4 billion."

"From this lucrative business the Taliban took around $125 million in tax.

"But according to U.N. figures they need around $800 million per year for their operational needs."

However, most of the trade is controlled by organized criminal groups from outside Afghanistan. Therefore Demirbuken believes groups such as the Taliban and al Qaeda will be forging links with criminal gangs in order to become more involved in the production and trafficking stages.

In addition to the increased revenue greater involvement would provide, he said groups such as al Qaeda "will have noted the destabilizing effect this industry -- and the sums of money it generates -- can have on more vulnerable countries with weak governments."

In October last year, the United States told NATO members that the drug trade was a threat to coalition troops because there was a direct connection between it and Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

"There is what we call a nexus of insurgency. There's a very broad range of militant groups that are combined with the criminality, with the narco-trafficking system, with corruption, that form a threat and a challenge to the future of that great country," then-U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. David McKiernan told reporters.

As a result NATO combat forces have now been actively attacking militants, drug laboratories and buildings connected to insurgents with ties to drug lords for the first time since the start of the Afghan conflict in 2001.

Meanwhile, international law enforcement organization, Interpol, believes there has been a change of tactic involving Afghanistan's opium, with much more of it being turned into heroin within the country and stockpiled or couriered out, primarily through Iran.

Historically Afghanistan has been responsible only for cultivating raw opium, with the conversion into a final product taking place across the border in Pakistan or in Iran and Turkey, according to the UNODC.
Producing heroin in Afghanistan makes it easier to conceal and transport than the bulkier raw opium.

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