U.S. Healthcare Reform: A Follow-Up

In the March 2010 issue of Searcher, I provided a guide to impartial and balanced resources useful for tracking the pending healthcare reform bill in the U.S. Congress. Shortly after publication of the column (The Medical Digital: “Universal Healthcare: A Guide to Unbiased Resources”), Congress passed bill H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (also known as PPAC) [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:h.r.03590:]. President Barack Obama signed the legislation into law on March 23. A week later, on March 30, Obama signed a separate bill, H.R. 4872, The Health Care & Education Reconciliation Act [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:h.r.04872:]. This new bill resolved differences between the House and Senate versions of PPAC. Since each piece of legislation is nearly 1,000 pages long, I thought it might be useful to provide a follow-up list of resources that simply lay out the major provisions of the bills and time frames for enactment.
Despite passage of the two laws, the legislation continues to come under intense scrutiny. Some states have filed lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of specific aspects of the bills. For example, some states are challenging whether or not the federal government has sovereignty over the states in legislating healthcare reform changes and are contesting PPAC’s provision that individuals and businesses must purchase health insurance or face financial penalties. Consequently, politicians, partisan policy centers and think tanks, and news organizations are being closely monitored by fact-checking groups to catch inaccurate or false statements about the legislation. Some of the fact-checking sources were mentioned in the earlier column, but a number of new ones, mainly from newspapers, have sprung up.

As before, I searched for neutral sources that clearly and unambiguously lay out healthcare’s major changes. I mainly focused on short, easy-to-read summaries or timelines that information professionals and libraries/information centers can pass on to their constituents, whether individuals or human resource departments responsible for their organizations’ health insurance plans. I thought there might be a great deal of overlap of sources with the March column, but, surprisingly, other than the Kaiser Family Foundation, all resources listed below are brand new. For those interested in serious, scholarly research regarding the historical progress of U.S. healthcare reform, this column and the prior column might be a good pairing.