The cost of health insurance has been rising faster than almost any other single commodity in Maryland for the past several years. It has gotten so bad that today almost 17% of all Maryland residents are without health care coverage of any kind, and as more and more businesses scale back their health care coverage for employees, the number of uninsured Maryland residents is almost certain to rise dramatically.

If you work for a company that offers a group health insurance plan join it if you possibly can. Group health insurance is almost always less expensive than individual health insurance.

If your company does not offer group coverage or if you are self employed then you may have no choice but to compare low cost health insurance plans until you find one that you can afford.

Decide how large of a co-payment you can afford to make each time you visit your family doctor, each time you have lab work done, each time you have an out-patient procedure performed, etc.

Your co-pay is the amount of cash you must pay out of your own pocket at the time you receive medical treatment. The larger your co-pay the less your insurance company must pay and the lower your monthly premiums will be.

For many people even that may not be enough to make health insurance affordable. For those people there may be a different answer.

If you have a home or if you have a savings account or any other assets that you have worked hard for and which you would not like to lose then it may be time for you to simply alter the way you look at health insurance.

Instead of looking at health insurance as something that pays (or at least partly pays) for routine doctor's office visits and other routine health care, perhaps it time to think of health insurance as a safety net, as something to protect your home and your assets in the event of a catastrophic accident or illness.

For example, you may find it much more affordable to buy a health insurance policy with a very high deductible, a deductible of $2,000 or even $3,000.

With such a policy you will pay for 100% of your routine health care costs out of your own pocket. You will pay for all doctor's office visits, for all routine lab work and for most out-patient services. In many ways it will seem as if you don't have any health insurance at all.

That is until you are hit with a catastrophic accident or illness. It's hardly any secret that a major illness or an accident can set you back tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in the blink of an eye, wiping out everything you have ever worked and saved for and possibly putting your home in jeopardy.

However, this is where an affordable high-deductible health insurance policy steps in and saves the day. No matter how outrageously high your medical bills are, your low-cost high-deductible policy pays for everything other than your deductible.

Regardless of whether you are looking at a high-deductible policy or not, your next step is to get online and start comparing health insurance policies and their costs from different insurance companies.

In order to insure that you are comparing all health insurance companies in Maryland you need to fill out the form on at least 2 and preferably 3 different comparison websites. Once you have done that you can rest assured that you have done everything possible to compare low cost health insurance in Maryland and you will know beyond a doubt that you have found the most affordable insurance possible for your situation.