Enjoy your health care reform ... while you can.

Sunday – the first day of the New Year – is also the first day for two important provisions of the new health care reform law.

The first change will start to close the infamous donut hole in prescription drug plans. When you suddenly discover that the drug you’ve been paying $42 a month for will now will cost $197 a month until the end of the year … welcome to the donut hole!

But the second change is the biggie. It will require insurance companies to pay out no less than 80 percent of the money they take in from premiums on actual health care costs. As of Monday morning, overhead, profit, salaries and those multi-million dollar bonuses for executives will all have to come out of the remaining 20 percent.

The plain, unvarnished truth: any insurance company that hasn’t already been meeting that 80:20 ratio has been screwing its customers.

And these two provisions are part of the law that Republicans in Congress will try to repeal.
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