A lot of companies claim to offer low cost health insurance
, but few deliver. Although finding the best and walking away from the rest will require some homework and research, it can be done.

Shopping for the best low cost health insurance will require a computer with an Internet connection or a telephone book and a poised and ready dialing finger. Along with these things, a notepad, pen and calculator are very good ideas to have on hand.

Before calling or applying online for different forms of health insurance, it’s a good idea to set up some criteria for the insurance policy desired. This will enable the comparison of apples to apples to try and find the best overall coverage for the most reasonable rate.

The things to consider include:

* Policy type. This means health maintenance organization, HMO, preferred provider organization, or PPO, or catastrophic coverage, which generally just covers major hospitalization issues.

* Deductible. How much money are you willing to pay out each year before the coverage really kicks in? This can range from as little as nothing up to $5,000 or more.

* Premium. How much can you afford or do you want to pay out each month for premiums?

* Co-pay. Do you desire a plan that will offer a co-pay structure for regular doctor’s visits? Do you want that co-pay structure to kick in before the deductible has even been met?

* Maximum exposure. Beyond premiums and co-pays, is there a limit you’re willing to pay up to on an annual basis before the insurance kicks in at 100 percent? Not all policies offer this stopgap figures, but anyone with a fear of a big emergency might benefit from this feature.

When a good, basic idea of what is desired has been determined, it’s time to start looking for the best prices. It might not be possible to find exactly the same coverage down to the last detail in each location reviewed, but it should be possible to stack them up closely enough for comparison.

Jot down the coverage offered, the monthly premium rate, the out-of-pocket limits and the deductible amounts paid from each location before making a final determination. It’s also not a bad idea to:

* Examine co-pay plans very closely. The $30 a doctor’s visit co-pay might sound like it offers great savings, but if it’s $200 a month more than another option look closer. It is possible the doctor you want to use offers a contract rate for a different insurance company. If that rate happens to be $40 a visit, that extra $200 might just not be worth the price of admission.

* Look at the total bottom line. Consider a worse case scenario. How much would you spend in premiums, the deductible amounts and other expenses with each plan if the worse happened.

* Available doctors. If doctors you like or want to use are not available, the “best” low cost health insurance might not be the best.

Finding the best low cost health insurance can be done, but it will take some homework. Try to compare apples to apples where possible and look at the options very closely. What seems like the best savings, might turn out to be the worst.

At places the huge towers holding the humming cables that carry th eelectricity, you will see nothing or no one around, Everyone is scared to go near that. If it rains, it could kill. If there is a leakage of any sort, you could be dead. And if you dont die, you will spend the rest of your life in complete misery. The shock would be that powerful. 500 KV, Thats about 5000 times the voltage of what comes in the average household power socket in the US, and about 2500 times, what comes in many other parts of the world.

These lines are always headed to a sub station that will be located at the outskirts of a city. Such substations will be loaded with transformers everywhere, supplying each induvidual circuit that it connects to. Various power stations have different billing patterns, and the circuits differ according to the billing pattern. In places, resistive load, such as power that is used for lights and heaters are charged less, and power used for running inductive load such as Fans, ACs, Refrigerators, or anything at all thats associated with a coil or a motor inside is charged more.

There is something called a power factor that is used when calculating the total power consumed. For resistive load, the power factor is 1, and when you multiply V and I, you get the power, V being the Voltage and I being the current, so a light bulb drawing 1 Ampere of current at 110 volts is a 110 watts bulb since the powerfactor is 1, there is no difference.

But in inductive load, there is a power factor of 0.8 that that is included while calcualting power for inductive loads. Lets say a Refrigerator draws 3 amperes of current at 220 volts, and without the power factor taken into consideration, the total power that it consumes is clearly 660 Watts. But with the power factor, you would be consuming only 530 watts. At places where inductive load is not charged higher, they are given a common slab and they end up paying for 660 watts while their usage is only 530 watts, and when paying for inductive load seperately, you pay more money for the 530 watts. So its more or less the same, and it depends on your usage.

Coming back to the sub stations, several transformers are connected to these individual circuits. These transformers are supplied power by a very huge transformer that steps down the voltage from the high tension lines.

Power is then distributed from independent transformers to various local transformers in the city at a tension of 11KV or 11000 Volts.

I had to go to the bank today evening to top up my wallet, and on my way back, I happened to step inside a mobile store that is close to our office. Since I bought my Chinese phone, I have no idea on what are the new models and the new features that are in the market currently.  The man sitting behind the counter looked something like the nerdy man with thick glasses who appears in the commercial of Clorets long back, who goes to a Panwala and ask him why people eat Clorets, while the panwala dips his head into a bucket of water and says “Dont ask another time”.

I just asked him if he has got a PDA. Thats a phone that I think I will want next. Im bored with all the smart phones now I guess. Same old 5 Mega Pixel Camera, Mp3 Player with bass boost and a lot of memory. Nothing else. He said he had a 2nd hand HP IPaq for about Rs 7000, but the condition looked very bad, so I decided not to go for it. Then I asked him if he has got any chinese phones. He picked up a phone and showed me. It looked very cute. Dual Sim, same start up tone as in my chinese phone, and I was shocked  at what I saw. The start up screen said, Iphone, and the design and graphics was so good that if I didn’t know better, I would have believed that it was original and would have bought it.

I asked the man what the cost was, and he said Rs 3000. Thats $75. A non techie guy will get fooled easily by this, untill he start showing it off and when some one comes up and says that its a chinese phone. What are these chinese upto?

Battery is horrible, so they give 2 batteries, you never get chargers for it, and if you drop it, the phone is dead.