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How do you "cover" healthcare reform . . . in a minute?

In this month’s Minute, rather than taking on the impossible task of reviewing the healthcare reform bill that passed just a month ago (March 22) and explaining the specific repercussions for doctors and others in the medical profession in a "minute," we've decided to offer up a concise guide to information about the bill that will get you started or move you a bit further down the road toward understanding the legislation. The popular news media are still scrambling to make sense of it even while coverage of the bill is waning. It's clearly not the top-story, front page news it was when its passage was still in question, but for doctors and other medical professionals, it's impact on our professional lives is immediate and profound and will continue to change the way we do business now and in the future .

General information.

The final version of the bill, officially titled, H.R.3590 - Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed by Congress March 21 and became public law on March 23th, just over a month ago.

Besides its length and complexity, the law is a challenge to understand and interpret because many of the specifics of key provisions are open to interpretation and further debate and compromise by state and federal lawmakers in the future.

Statistics

Thinking of reading the bill for yourself and formulating your own opinions? You'll need to set aside about 40 hours just to read it through once.

• Just the official summary is 22,701 words (about 60 pages) long.
• The full text of the bill that passed into law is a sizeable bit of lawmaking (there are quite a number of earlier versions, and 6 versions of the final bill, so be careful which one you review--this link takes you to the official version on the Library of Congress website):
  • It's about 2,393 pages (406,877 words in 10,909 separate sections).
  • If you printed it out on ordinary 8.5 x 11" paper (which our tax money has paid to do an ungodly number of times) then laid the pages out end-to-end, it would be . . . 33,000 inches, 2,750 feet, 917 yards, 9 football fields, or just over a half mile long.
• The bill has been so politically charged that there are extreme interpretations and reactions from both ends of the politcal spectrum, and separate official Democratic and Republican summaries.

As you might expect, balanced reporting on the bill's current and future impact is difficult to find.

Balanced Coverage

The American Medical Association has done a practical, balanced review and published an excellent first-glance summary explaining how the new reform legislation impacts your medical practice along with the best FAQ summary anywhere (if you don't read anything else from this article, read their summary of the impact of creating an Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) on this page). But even their coverage is somewhat speculative and not-comprehensive . . . there are many important corner cases that any summary is going to miss, and important provisions we'll have to wait until later to understand.

We've only seen the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned.

To find out more about PBN business planning for healthcare reform, contact PBN,

PBN Business Development, 800.288.4901,

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Overland Park, KS 66210 | 800.288.4901 | pbnmed.com

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