Law News
In the area of law news, recent concerns have been raised by observers of the field that the law which was sponsored by the Barack Obama White House and passed by the House of Representatives in late March 2010 takes insufficient measures for ensuring that regulations will prohibit medical insurance companies from denying medical coverage to children on the basis that they have pre-existing medical conditions. The law has been charged by some critics to contain language that is too vague to ensure anything but such children as are affected by discriminatory medical insurance industry policies to be guaranteed medical coverage until 2014, the year when the health care reform bill goes into effect for ensuring that all American citizens under law must be part of a medical insurance plan. According to one such criticism that has been aired in the world of law news, the medical insurance industry will only be obligated by the law to cover preexisting conditions of children who are already covered under a health care plan. Since the medical industry is heavily resistant to any changes which will have the effect of diminishing its profit margins, some contend that the massive legislative effort for revising health care practices has already been demonstrated to be a failure in one of its key objectives.
Federal Laws
In the arena of implementation of federal laws, concerns are sometimes raised on the part of individual states as to the consequences that the specific enactment of such rules will have for their own constituencies. One notable instance in which such issues have arisen on the point of the implementations of laws on a state as opposed to a nationwide level is in the issue of state drug laws, which in California have sometimes taken unusually permissive and liberal forms in regards to existing federal laws. In 2010, this issue once again reared its head in the dramatic embodiment of fourteen state attorney generals announcing that they intended to file suit against the new Congressional bill, approved by the House of Representatives after a bitter and hard-fought legislative and media battle, overhauling the nation's health care system to a model intended to favor health care consumers over insurance providers. One of the central planks of the bill in regard to federal laws is the sweeping requirement that individuals have some form of health insurance, which has been picked up on by the state-based opponents of the bill's legality in charging that it is unconstitutional. Legal scholars have cautioned, however, that the consequences of the previous case involving the extent of state powers in terms of laws is likely to prevent opponents of the new bill from gaining much traction.