Health-care reform hanging by a thread?

America’s new health-care law is six months old, but whether it lives to see its final provisions go into effect in 2014 and beyond is a difficult prognosis to make.

On Sept. 23, several of the law’s most far-reaching changes went into effect, including prohibiting insurance companies from canceling coverage if the policyholder gets sick. Other provisions now prohibit insurance companies from setting lifetime dollar limits on coverage and allow young adults to stay on or return to their family’s health insurance policy until their 26th birthday.

Most non-partisan Americans would probably say these are changes that were needed to protect them from bankruptcy, home foreclosure or worse if they or their kids were to be hit with a catastrophic illness or accident. But just because the provisions have started to go into effect doesn’t mean they can count on them.

Opponents of the reform law, not satisfied with the vote of the U.S. Congress elected by the people, are intent on tearing it apart or killing it altogether.

Republican attorneys general in 21 states – including Colorado’s John Suthers – have joined together to get the law repealed on constitutional grounds, claiming that by forcing Americans to buy health-care coverage it oversteps the limits of federal control over states’ rights.

And on the same day that the new provisions went into effect, U.S. House Republican leaders announced their “Pledge to America,” which included a vow to repeal the law. “Because the new health-care law kills jobs, raises taxes and increases the cost of health care, we will immediately take action to repeal this law,” the pledge says.

Republicans, who solidly voted against reform without offering a viable alternative plan to fix what most health-care analysts agreed was a broken system, are hoping to take back control of the House and gain votes in the Senate in the upcoming November election.

Some Democrats, facing re-election in the face of an agonizingly slow jobs recovery, are distancing themselves from their votes instead of defending the improvements the new law is bringing to American families and businesses.

Those who were most supportive of health-care reform have retreated to the sidelines, whining that the new law is bad because it didn’t go far enough and provide the so-called public option that could have wrested control of health care in this country from the insurance industry once and for all.

So is health-care reform hanging by a thread?

“No, it’s not,” says Dede de Percin, executive director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, which advocates for health-care access for all Coloradans. “First of all, one of the reasons such a comprehensive bill passed is because, while not everybody agrees on the fix, just about everybody agreed (the system) was in shambles and had become a huge issue for the average American working family. So the system had to be fixed. I think there’s a lot in it that both business and families get out of it and it won’t be repealed.”

In full disclosure, de Percin acknowledges that CCHI initially supported a single-payer public plan. “In a perfect world, we would have liked to have seen a public option,” she said. “It’s not a perfect (law), but there’s still a lot of good in it. Some of the things that rolled out on Sept. 23 were really common sense and would be standard business practice in almost any other industry.”

Even if Republicans take back control of the House and Senate in November, the chances of a major repeal of the law are slim. It would take a two-thirds vote in both Congressional bodies to overcome a veto by President Obama, and that big of an electoral change is not likely.

Many Constitutional scholars have said they don’t believe the attorney general lawsuit will succeed because Congress has the power to regulate commerce.

De Percin said she hopes the new law will soon join Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as part of the fabric of American life.

Besides, she adds, there’s so many other bigger issues – like reviving the nation’s economy – that are occupying the minds of Americans.

“At this point, it’s the law and most people just want to move on.”

Steve Porter covers health care for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-232-3147 or sporter@ncbr.com.

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