Affordable Care Act Repeal Bill Published [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Affordable Care Act Repeal Bill Published [pdf]

energycommerce.house.gov

I will admit to having only skimmed it, as well as reading the cnn [0] piece on it, but literally the one expansion-of-coverage move that Trump kept talking about - interstate competition - doesn't appear to be part of it.

[0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/06/politics/republicans-public-ob...

Not that it would likely make much difference. Some states have authorized cross state insurance company reciprocity but AFAICT no companies have taken advantage of it.

The regulatory patchwork makes it difficult. Even if some states have authorized it, you still have individual regulators in those states themselves. I work in a different type of insurance, but even in my space, writing one insurance contract that satisfies two sets of regulators isn't easy.

A full blown shift to federal regulation of insurance is probably too much to ask - and frankly, the state regulated system we have today is more consumer-friendly so I doubt anyone except insurance companies wants to give that up. We could, however, do with a federal definition of a basic policy that is authorized to market in all 50 states. Something (and I'm simplifying) like what Switzerland does with a legally defined minimum set of coverage that all policies must offer - the Swiss also regulate the pricing of that contract, but let's set that aside for now and start with price competition on a defined minimum coverage.

It's hard to follow this bill format -- it's like one big patch file.

Is there a way to get the 'patched' output, with diff highlighting?

This is the format of all bills and lawyers have been asking for this for some time. It's a very hard problem to solve.

Do people have tools that help with this now? If not, sounds like a project that groups like sunlight foundation would fund.

But I agree, it seems pretty hard and would involve being able to properly identify which sections are to be amended (there's a lot of navigational references like "paragraph", "subsection", "subparagraph" and how to apply the verbs I can see: "adding", "striking", "inserting", and I'm not sure how precise the existing documentation is in its references.

I'm a lawyer by training, although I no longer practice law, and what I'll say is that when you read enough of these you get pretty good at piecing it together provided that you have some grounding in the existing law (since it's very heavy on amending language). This problem has been on my list for a long time, I've just never had enough time to think it all through. It's probably more approachable now versus 5-10 years ago given the advances in NLP, which at least in my mind, was the barrier on getting started.

The navigational references are not always consistent. They're human-readable, but not really marked up for straight machine processing. Given that you'd probably never get the Federal government to move toward some kind of standard markup, I think any solution would be AI-driven (not to overuse the buzzword, but I think it fits).

One day I'll get started on this. I have no idea how it could make any money, but I've been interested in it since law school.

I'm hesitant to ask who else wants to work on this, because by this evening, this will be back in the category of things I don't have time to look at.

Can't they just make a google doc?

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