Is health care reform here to stay? [View all]

[Playinghardball]

By The New York Times, Herald-Tribune / Wednesday, May 23, 2012

WASHINGTON — The new health care law is already transforming the way care is delivered, and the changes will continue regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the mandate for most Americans to carry health insurance, a Democratic senator and an Obama administration official said Tuesday.

The comments by the senator, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and the official, Dr. Richard J. Gilfillan, indicated how Democrats were preparing for a Supreme Court ruling on the 2010 law. The law, which President Barack Obama pushed through Congress on a party-line vote, promises to be a salient issue in elections for the White House and Congress this year.

Whitehouse said “there is no link, no link whatsoever,” between the insurance mandate and the work of Gilfillan’s agency, which promotes innovations in Medicare and Medicaid.

“The delivery system reforms will survive, and we should not be stalling and dawdling because we are anxious about what the court will do,” Whitehouse said at a forum held by the Center for American Progress, a research and advocacy group with close ties to the White House. “We don’t have that luxury, and I don’t think it’s a genuine risk.”

More at: http://health.heraldtribune.com/2012/05/23/is-health-care-reform-here-to-stay/