If you want to start a fight, find a mixed crowd and take a firm and vocal stand one way or the other on the recent health care legislation. It seems like everybody has an opinion one way or the other, and the opinions seem to run particularly strong on this issue. While there are a few true ideologues on both sides of the issue, most Americans just want to know one thing: how will this affect me and my medical insurance?

That’s not an easy question to answer yet. Many of the members of Congress who voted on the legislation admittedly haven’t read it thoroughly and it has yet to be seen how all of it will look once it’s implemented. Further complicating things is the fact that much of it won’t be implemented for several years.

The bottom line is that most of us don’t have all of the details yet, and the new policies will affect different people in different ways, depending on their circumstances. But here are a few effects that you can count on:

• If you have medical insurance, you probably won’t notice much change. There is some speculation that prices will rise, but they’ve been doing that anyway.

• Those who have been unable to receive insurance due to health issues will be able to get coverage.

• Much of the increasing cost of insurance (due to insurance companies paying more in claims) will be covered by business. Bear in mind, however, that businesses seldom simply swallow added costs, instead passing them along to their customers or finding other ways to cut costs.

• All Americans will be required to obtain insurance, with rather stiff penalties for refusing to do so. There will be subsidies in place for those with lower incomes, but it’s not clear yet where all of the cutoffs will be.

• Business owners, especially small business owners, will receive incentives to insure their employees. This obviously affects you if you own a small business, or are employed by one. The amount small business will be able to claim as deductions for employee health care will be increased significantly, the hope being that more small employers will be able to insure their workers.

However it turns out, there are two things that are fairly certain:

1. It doesn’t quite make health care affordable to everyone as many on the left would like to assert.

1. Nor is the end of the free world as we know it, as many on the right would have us believe. Life will go on. We just need to figure out how this will affect one small part of it.