Health Law

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Wooing Florida voters, President Obama warned Thursday that Republican challenger Mitt Romney would gut his health-care reform law and turn Medicare into a voucher program, driving up costs for the elderly on fixed incomes. Romney, firing away near his Boston home base, accused Obama of caring only about saving his own job - not the jobs of Americans. In the daily war of words in an up-for-grabs presidential contest, health-care politics took top billing as Obama opened two days of campaigning in Florida, the largest and most coveted of the nation's Election Day toss-up states.

By Peter A. Ubel, Aaron Kay, and Gavan Fitzsimons Despite all the controversy that preceded the enactment of health-care reform a year ago today, most health-policy experts confidently predicted that the public would soon embrace it. They pointed out that Medicare, which was quite controversial when it was established in the 1960s, rapidly grew in popularity. Much the same happened with Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush's extension of coverage to medication. But recent polls belie these predictions.

WASHINGTON - Sharp questioning by the Supreme Court's conservative justices cast serious doubt Tuesday on the survival of the individual insurance requirement at the heart of President Obama's historic health-care overhaul. Arguments at the high court focused on whether the mandate for virtually every American to have insurance "is a step beyond what our cases allow," in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy. But Kennedy, who is often the swing vote on cases that divide the justices along ideological lines, also said he recognized the magnitude of the nation's health-care problem and seemed to suggest that it would require a comprehensive solution.

For too many people, for too many years, Pennsylvania's mental health nonsystem hasn't been there when they needed it. The case of torture-killing suspect Gary Michael Heidnik has raised questions anew. In 1979 a psychologist warned that he required close supervision; supervision that, tragically, was never provided. Yet the harmless suffer, too, some curled on the vents of the city, some idling passively in downtown Norristown, where merchants lobbied last year to have benches removed to discourage that practice.

ALDOUS HUXLEY once made this chilling observation: "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. " I thought of this in the days after the election, as the Left and the Right started arguing about what this country will look like in four more years. Those of us who did not vote for Barack Obama fear that the 2.0 version of his administration will permanently move us from a nation of makers to a nation of takers.

Louis Morris was nervously massaging his jaw over and over. The hygienic scent of dentistry around him was only deepening his anxiety. The burly North Philadelphia man, 33, had not seen a dentist in 15 years. Several teeth had recently fallen out, and he had suffered three abscesses but couldn't afford dental care even when he worked a clerical job at the Burlington Coat Factory. "Between kids, bills, taking care of my mom, who had cancer, you have to make a choice," he said.

When state Sen. F. Joseph Loeper (R., Delaware) unveiled a "blueprint for improvement" of Pennsylvania's balkanized, hughly expensive mental-health system last fall, he was right on target - most of the way. His task force called for dovetailing often-competing state and community mental-health systems, assigning individual case managers, improving staff training and providing a dependable flow of state dollars to upgrade treatment. But then came the clunker. Responding to horror stories, his group wrote language into a subsequent Senate bill that would greatly ease involuntary commitments - a reversal of a 20-year trend in the other direction for state mental-health law. This wasn't a complete surprise.

The Bush administration yesterday joined a majority of Congress in calling for a thorough overhaul of a new law designed to see that employer-financed health-insurance coverage is extended to more workers. The law, Internal Revenue Code Section 89, is imposing enormous administrative burdens on many employers, Dana L. Trier, the Treasury Department's tax counsel, told the House Ways and Means Committee. "We are very convinced it is simply not workable in its present form," Trier said in pledging support for simplifying amendments introduced April 13 by committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D., Ill.)

Retired government lawyer Carol Lebow's son, Edward, 24, started law school this year, so when she heard that federal health-care legislation would allow him to be insured under her policy, she was thrilled. "It makes a difference if your kid can stay on your plan," said Lebow, who lives in Yardley. On Thursday, six months after the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, several provisions begin to take effect - among them, the ability of parents to cover their adult children up to age 26 under their policies.

WASHINGTON - A conservative-leaning appeals court panel on Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of President Obama's health-care law, as the Supreme Court prepares to consider this week whether to resolve conflicting rulings over the law's requirement that all Americans buy health-care insurance. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a split opinion upholding the lower court's ruling that found Congress did not overstep its authority in requiring people to have insurance or pay a penalty on their taxes, beginning in 2014.