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.
In response to the widespread coverage this charge has received in the arena of law news, the Obama administration and its allies among key Democrat law makers have issued assurances that the health care reform bill is indeed intended to guarantee on an immediate basis that children enjoy the right to medical coverage despite preexisting conditions. In response to the concerns that the lawmakers had insufficiently vetted the bill to ensure that it would carry the necessary provisions, the spokesman for Health and Human Services announced that the agency planned on issuing regulations later that month to clarify that the law was intended to cover both individual benefits contained in a plan already being held and the general issue of access to medical coverage plans. Both medical insurance company lobbying firms and patients' rights groups have issued press releases to law news outlets citing concerns that as it presently formulated the law will only prohibit the denial of medical coverage to children with preexisting conditions by 2014. The medical insurance industry's lobbying arm has also issued a statement to the world of law news that forcing the industry to begin covering all sick children would drive it into a financial hole. Another response that has been issued to criticisms and limited readings of the health care reform law relating to the prohibition against medical insurance firms systemically denying medical coverage benefits to children on account of the presence of preexisting conditions is that a panacea will exist for the parents and caretakers of such children even without the enactment of regulatory modification to that section of the bill in the form of the insurance "pool" for people unable to afford health care coverage.