WASHINGTON— One year after President Barack Obama signed his historic health care overhaul, the law is taking in root in the land. Whether it bears lasting fruit is still in question.
The legislation established health insurance as a right and a responsibility. Thousands of families, businesses and seniors have benefited from its early provisions.
But worries about affordability and complexity point to problems ahead. And that's assuming it withstands a make-or-break challenge to its constitutionality that the Supreme Court is expected to decide. [See a slide show of 10 ways the GOP can take down Obamacare.]
Public divisions over the law are still so sharp that Americans can't even agree what to call it. Supporters call it the Affordable Care Act, a shorter form of its unwieldy official title. It's also known as "Obamacare," the epithet used by Republicans seeking its demise.
While Obama returns from Latin America on the signing anniversary Wednesday, administration officials will fan out across the country. Community commemorations started Monday, underscoring that the health care battle has moved to the states. Even states suing to nullify the law's requirement that most Americans carry health insurance are proceeding with at least some of the building blocks.
Polls show that about one in eight people believe they have been personally helped already, well before the provision kicks in in 2014 to cover millions of uninsured. Interviews with people affected reveal it's not always clear-cut.
In small-town Circleville, N.Y., Patti Schley says one of the dozens of new insurance regulations made a dramatic difference for her family.
Her daughter Megan, 23, was out of college, going without insurance as she tried to launch a wedding photography business. Last summer Megan started getting sick and rapidly lost weight. Doctors diagnosed a serious digestive system disorder that would make her uninsurable.
But her parents were able to get her into a high-risk insurance pool created under the law, and this year Megan signed up for her father's workplace plan, under a provision extending coverage for adult children up to age 26.
"As a mother of a sick child, you are concerned whether your kid is 4 or 24," said Schley, an office administrator. "We couldn't wait for this to kick in."
[Check out a roundup of political cartoons on healthcare.]
Things are working out for the Schleys, but the high-risk pools that provided the initial lifeline for Megan are faltering. Nationally, the latest count shows fewer than 12,500 people signed up, mainly because of waiting periods and high premiums.
Another mom with an uninsured daughter ran into a Catch-22 that illustrates the law's complexity.
Mary Thompson of Overland Park, Kan., was sure the law would finally get 11-year-old Emily on the family's health insurance.
Insurers had repeatedly rejected Emily due to a birth defect of the spine, surgically corrected when she was an infant. The law requires insurers to accept children regardless of pre-existing health problems, a safeguard that will extend to people of all ages in 2014.
But because Emily's father is self-employed and the family buys its own coverage, things didn't work out as expected.
Certain "grandfathered" plans selling individual coverage are exempt from the law's requirement to cover kids. The Thompsons' plan was one. That meant they would have to apply for a whole new policy, and the mother, a breast cancer survivor, was unlikely to be accepted.
"We would have had to start over with me — and I can't start over," said Thompson. A social worker helped get Emily into Medicaid.
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