After year, health care results not clear

WASHINGTON -- One year after President Barack Obama signed his historic health care overhaul, the law is taking root in the land. Whether it bears lasting fruit is still in question.

Thousands of families, businesses and seniors have benefited from the law's 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.

Polls show that about one in eight people believe they have been personally helped already, but interviews with people affected reveal it's not always clear-cut.

In Circleville, N.Y., in Orange County, Patti Schley said last summer, her daughter Megan, 23, 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.

But the high-risk pools are faltering. Nationally, fewer than 12,500 people have 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 get Emily, 11, born with a birth defect of the spine that has been surgically corrected, on the family's plan. The law requires insurers to accept children regardless of pre-existing problems, a safeguard that will extend to all people in 2014.

But Emily's father is self-employed and buys the family's coverage from a company that is "grandfathered" from the requirement to cover kids. That meant they would have to apply for a new policy, and Mary, 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.

Affordability is the main worry for critics. A recent poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in five Americans said they had been negatively affected by the law, and about half of those cited costs.