Choosing health insurance in a confusing marketplace

Anyone buying health insurance this fall faces a daunting task: having to choose among multiple, often-complex options that offer widely varying degrees of protection.

For starters, association health plans are back, allowing small businesses to band together to buy insurance. So are the short-term policies that may last from only a few months to a year. Then there are plans offered by church ministries that look like insurance but really aren’t. Plus, multiple and complex options remain from the Affordable Care Act.

And to complicate matters further, if a bill just introduced in Congress pass...