This Year

From President Obama's remarks before signing the health insurance reform bill:

"It will take four years to implement fully many of these reforms, because we need to implement them responsibly. We need to get this right. But a host of desperately needed reforms will take effect right away.

This year, we’ll start offering tax credits to about 4 million small businessmen and women to help them cover the cost of insurance for their employees.

This year, tens of thousands of uninsured Americans with preexisting conditions, the parents of children who have a preexisting condition, will finally be able to purchase the coverage they need. That happens this year.

This year, insurance companies will no longer be able to drop people’s coverage when they get sick. They won’t be able to place lifetime limits or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care they can receive.

This year, all new insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care. And this year, young adults will be able to stay on their parents’ policies until they’re 26 years old. That happens this year.

And this year, seniors who fall in the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole will start getting some help. They’ll receive $250 to help pay for prescriptions, and that will, over time, fill in the doughnut hole. And I want seniors to know, despite what some have said, these reforms will not cut your guaranteed benefits. In fact, under this law, Americans on Medicare will receive free preventive care without co-payments or deductibles. That begins this year."

The President went on to talk about the insurance exchanges, the other tax credits and provisions that will be phased in over the next four years. But there are other reforms that patients and their families will see in the medical system they encounter, some of them soon, all of them within that four year time frame. Ezra Klein in the Washington Post named several:

Merrill Goozner points out another little-noticed provision in the bill: "Drug and device companies will soon have to report payments to physicians in a national database, thanks to a little noted section of the health care reform bill called the Physician Payments Sunshine Act."

...hospitals will have to post prices. Insurance products will be presented with standardized information, consumer ratings and quality measures. The payments physicians take from drug and device companies will be in a public database. There will be independent funding for research on the relative effectiveness of different treatments. Some of these changes are small and some are big, but put together, the system is going to become a lot more visible in the coming years."

As President Obama said later at the Interior Department, the purpose of the bill is not to give the government more control or the insurance companies more control, but to give patients and the people paying the premiums more control over their health care and their health.