Love. What original, profound thing can anybody say about love? Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Homer, Flaubert, Colette have all had a go at it. . . . “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love,” “Love is, of all the passions, the strongest, for it attacks the head, the heart and senses simultaneously,” “Love is a human emotion that wisdom will never conquer,” “Love is blind, and cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit,” blah, blah, blah.

The rules, if there are any, are inconsistent: One set says, Give all, hold nothing back, devote yourself utterly to the beloved and you’ll “win”; another school (my school) says, Do all that and you could be a candidate for the Bellevue psychiatric ward—at least if you do it too soon or don’t check the effect it’s having on the beloved. Nevertheless, for some of us, loving casually is about as possible as trying to assemble a main-frame IBM computer from a box of component parts. Yet, if getting love counsel from a sufferer (me) is like getting investment advice from the Franklin National Bank or consulting Dracula about your anemia, how can you even think of discussing love with a non-sufferer? A woman who has never had a moment’s insecurity with a man . . . what does she know?

May I tell you then what I absolutely think I know about love, one mouseburger to another?

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No matter what type of health insurance you’ve chosen, or even how good it is, some time or another you may have to defend a claim that your insurer has denied. The claim may be unjustly rejected because of a clerical or other error, and usually a phone call or letter will quickly resolve the matter in dispute. Then there are the times that insurers deny coverage for treatments that are not medically necessary or for treatments that are considered experimental. Be prepared to persist against what at times will seem an impenetrable insurance bureaucracy. Surveys have found that policyholders who contest denials of benefits have at least a 50 percent chance of gaining satisfaction.

Here’s how to protect your rights:

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Now that you can decipher many of the codes you will come across in insurance policies, you’re ready to shop around among the different types of insurance. First, a rundown on each type:
Hospital insurance. This provides coverage for inpatient and outpatient hospital services. For inpatient services this insurance usually specifies the number of days of hospitalization the policy covers and specifies dollar limits on total benefits payable.

Medical-surgical insurance. This coverage is divided into two portions: The medical portion pays for doctor visits to the hospital and may pay for office visits. Other medical services covered include drugs, X rays, anesthesia, and laboratory tests performed outside the hospital. The surgical portion covers the surgeon’s fees, whether the surgery was performed in the hospital, the doctor’s office, or an ambulatory surgical center. (An ambulatory surgical center is a medical facility where surgical procedures are performed on an outpatient basis. It may be a freestanding center or a facility associated with a hospital but separate from it.)

Major medical insurance. Often referred to as catastrophic insurance, this coverage protects against the high cost of medical care associated with a serious illness or accident. Before benefits are paid, this type of insurance usually requires you to pay a yearly deductible, typically ranging from $100 to $500, although deductibles vary from one policy to another. After the deductible is met, major medical insurance pays up to a certain percentage of covered expenses while you pay the remaining percentage. A typical coinsurance arrangement is 80 percent paid by your insurance company and 20 percent by you.

Once your out-of-pocket expenses reach a certain amount, many major medical policies protect you from further outlays of cash. This is known as a stop-loss provision. Your insurance company pays the remaining covered expenses up to the maximum limit. Because of such a provision, and the protection major medical insurance offers, if you can afford only one type of health insurance, you should consider purchasing a major medical policy.
It is important to remember that major medical insurance is usually cheaper than hospital or medical-surgical insurance because of the sometimes large deductibles these policies carry.

Angina (pronounced an-JI-nuh), or severe chest pains that may accompany exertion, is a symptom of impaired circulation affecting the heart and should of course be evaluated and monitored regularly by your physician. Most of the information discussed in our entry on HEART DISEASE is relevant to angina, so we recommend that you consult that part of the book. Here, we will deal specifically with just two of the many aspects of angina.

Although we usually associate angina with periods of unusual e ertion or emotional stress, angina can also strike in the middle of th night, shattering sleep with a painful and terrifying real-life nightmare Digitalis and diuretics are often used to treat such nocturnal angina on the theory that one of the major mechanisms of this disorder is increase in the return of blood from the veins when the body is in supine position. Recently, heart specialists at two medical centers in Israel decided to see what would happen if the entire body was simply tilted slightly during sleep, with the feet down and the head up. Would this simple change in sleeping position affect blood flow enough to make a difference in episodes of nocturnal angina?

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