We're in kind of an odd situation with our health insurance. My husband works full-time for a school district. The cost of insuring our family through the district would be somewhere around $1500 a month - or at least, that's what it was two years ago when we bailed on the district's health plan. It was $600 a month five years ago for the same plan, so you can get an idea of the rate of increase.

We've had a small business doing consulting on the side for a number of years. Two years ago we started buying a small group health plan for myself and my husband and our kids to get out of the district's insurance - it's not a great plan, but it costs less than half as much as buying insurance through the district. Even with my husband having to have an MRI and surgery last year for something acute and unrelated, we still didn't end up exceeding the cost of the district's insurance. We still buy life insurance through the district, as that is much cheaper than going through the business.

I'm not sure how our insurance rate is going to be affected by his diagnosis, or how much it will go up. My premiums actually went down last year, and my husband's would have gone down too if he hadn't turned 40. Any changes to both the district's and our personal plans have to be in place by May 30, or we have to wait another year.

We're calling our GP today to see if we can get the blood work and the chest X-ray/CT expedited, before my hubby's neuro appointment on the 30th. I'm not sure which they will want to do since they can't use iodine contrast on my husband - he blows up like a balloon. I know that doing the tests might trigger something with our health insurance, but I think it's better to know up-front how bad or good the situation is so we can plan.

Oh, and kind of a funny warning to us has already happened. The optometrist we saw last week told my husband that quinine (tonic water) would help with the eye twitch he's had for a while (probably due to stress). Quinine apparently will exacerbate MG symptoms and is to be avoided, and she probably had an idea that my husband possibly had MG when she advised this because she had already done the ice pack test. I'm getting the feeling we're going to have to really stay on top of what medications are and aren't safe, because I'm sure we can't expect the average doc to keep those in their heads.