Some of my biases are that the idea of trying to help more people pay for health care is nice; that most of the people trying to implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are lovely, hard-working folks who mean well; and that PPACA itself will probably turn out to be riddled with neon, fire-breathing, psychic worms of the like that no mortal can imagine.
Every law has good things in it and bad things in it, and PPACA will be no exception.
My guess would be that the stuff that seems scariest today will turn out to be of no importance whatsoever, and that the stuff that will eat our livers out will be fragments of footnotes that few of us have noticed.
A case in point: The PPACA patient bill of rights section.
The other day, I was interviewing Mark Holloway, a compliance specialist at Lockton, for a regulatory story, and somehow remembered to ask him, "Whatever happened to the PPACA bill of rights section?"
The patient rights section does things like setting provider access standards and standards for internal and external appeals.
Back in the 1990s and early Aughts, many insurance and employer groups viewed patient rights proposals about the same way PPACA critics view the PPACA public exchange program today.