WASHINGTON – It will be more than two years before health care reform legislation begins to protect people with health insurance from catastrophic medical expenses, but a national organization says most Illinois families stand to save money when new out-of-pocket medical spending caps are imposed in 2014.

Under the Affordable Care Act, which is rolling out massive changes to the health care system, health insurance plans will be required to limit how much an individual person or family has to pay out of pocket for their covered medical expenses.

The caps will limit how much anyone has to pay for such things as deductibles, co-insurance and co-payments for their insurance benefits.

"In Illinois, we estimate there are over 50,000 people in the state who will be spending in excess of the cap this year and in the aggregate they will be spending more than $1 billion over the cap this year," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a national health care consumers organization that released a report Tuesday entitled Worry Less, Spend Less, on the effect of the out-of-pocket caps.

To do its analysis, the organization said it applied the caps as though they were in effect this year.

Overwhelmingly, people who stand to be protected by out-of-pocket caps live in working families with at least one breadwinner and "what is also interesting is a very significant portion of these people who are in working families have a breadwinner who is working in a small business," Pollack said.

Pollack says two decades of rising health care costs have left American families squeezed by higher cost-sharing for their medical expenses and increasingly vulnerable to financial devastation such as bankruptcy or foreclosure. Nearly 15 million people across the nation will deal with this kind of crisis this year, he said.

People with chronic conditions have already felt the effects of higher out-of-pocket costs, but anybody is vulnerable to unexpected injury or illness. About 1.5 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer this year, more than 340,000 people in the U.S. need an emergency appendectomy each year, and at least 670,000 people wind up in surgery for a broken bone, according to data in the report.

It doesn't take long for the bills from uncovered medical expenses to start piling up, so out-of-pocket caps stand to have a "profound impact," Pollock said.

If the caps went into effect in 2011 dollars, they would be $5,950 for individuals and $11,900 for families, according to Families USA, but the caps will be lower for families with incomes below 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $90,000 for a family of four) that purchase their coverage through one of the new insurance exchanges being established under the Affordable Care Act.