Abstract
On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed comprehensive health reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and commonly referred to as "Obamacare" or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), into law. With the passage of the ACA, Congress put an end to the century-long quest to secure coverage for all Americans facing steadily rising costs for increasingly sophisticated health care. In closing the book on that struggle, however, the law opened another. Health Care Reform: Law and Practice is designed to assist health care and legal professionals who need to understand what the law says, how it works, and what it requires. This treatise provides expert coverage on the impact to employers, employers and employee benefit plans; impact on health plans, insurers, and managed care organizations; impact on providers; impact on individuals (addressing access to coverage and state health insurance exchanges; impact on Medicare and Medicaid patients and providers; impacts on fraud and abuse enforcement; interaction of the Affordable Care Act with several statutes that pre-date its enactment (such as Health Information Technology for Economic & Clinical Health Act (HITECH), Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act )CHIPRA), Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) of 2008, Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (expanding the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996), and TRICARE, the federally funded and administered health care service program for active and retired members of the military and their families) ), and more