Having health insurance provides a safety net in case you end up with a serious injury or illness: All non-grandfathered, non-grandmothered major medical health insurance plans will cap your in-network out-of-pocket costs (a combination of copays, deductibles, and coinsurance) at no more than an amount determined by CMS each year, regardless of how high your medical bills actually get. For 2022, it's $8,700 for a single person and $17,400 for a family, although many plans have lower limits (these upper caps increase to $9,100 and $18,200 in 2023). Health insurance also helps with smaller expenses in the form of free preventive care (required on all non-grandfathered major medical plans; the enrollee does not have to pay a deductible, copay, or coinsurance for a service that falls within the list of recommended preventive care) and, depending on the plan, copays for things like office visits and prescription drugs. (If the plan has copays, it generally means you pay a certain amount for those services and the health insurance plan pays the rest of the costs, even if you haven't met your deductible yet.) Thanks to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), all non-grandfathered, non-grandmothered individual and small-group major medical plans include coverage for the types of care that are considered essential health benefits under the ACA, without any maximum cap on how much the insurance plan will pay for your care. (Large-group plans and self-insured plans are governed differently; they are not required to cover essential health benefits – although most of them do – but for any service they do cover that falls within an essential health benefit category, they cannot impose lifetime or annual benefit maximums).