What will the health law look like in the future?

News outlets report on a range of issues related to the health law, from efforts to repeal the measure's tax on insurance policies to competing claims about its costs.

Politico: Theory To Practice: Health Care Reform
Critics and supporters of the health reform law have one thing in common: Neither group knows what the most wide-reaching changes of the law look like in the real world. Those changes — to the insurance market, to patient care and to control of Medicare costs — simply don't exist yet. And if the law's critics succeed in their efforts to repeal or reshape it, many of these reforms won't ever exist (Haberkorn, Millman and Feder, 7/31).

The Hill: Ross Backs Bill To Repeal Health Care Tax
A bill to repeal part of the health care reform law has picked up another Democratic co-sponsor — Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.). The bill, sponsored by Reps. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-La.) and Dan Boren (D-Okla.), would repeal the health care law's tax on insurance policies. The tax does not take effect until 2014 (Baker, 7/29).

The Washington Post: Health Care Law Could Give Rise To Entrepreneurs
The Department of Health and Human Services this month released guidelines on how to set up exchanges, and more than half the states already are taking steps to build them. Once they're up and running, you'll be able to quit your job at Large Company X and start that plumbing or carpentry business, that mom-and-pop restaurant or barbershop, without putting your family's health or finances at risk. You can open that dance studio, play in that band, live off savings while you write or paint or launch the tech venture that could make you the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg (Lawrence, 7/29).

Stateline: Health Law Cost Study Fuels Competing Claims
New projections show that health care spending will grow faster than the nation's GDP over the next decade. But the increase will be only slightly more than would be the case without the new national health law. At least that's what the White House and other health law supporters drew from a new analysis of actuarial data released by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (Vestal, 8/1).

Related, earlier from KHN: Nation's Health Care Bill To Nearly Double By 2020 (Galewitz, 7/28).

Meanwhile, National Journal tracks the course of the brouhaha that surrounded a report by McKinsey and Associates —

National Journal: How The Media Fell For McKinsey's Twisted Health Care Report
Mark Twain famously denounced "lies, damned lies, and statistics." So you can imagine what his reaction would have been to the controversial survey released earlier this month by McKinsey & Co., the prominent management consulting group. McKinsey wasn't lying, of course, when it proclaimed that a survey it had commissioned "points to a radical restructuring of employer-sponsored health benefits" in the years following implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The real eyepopper was the assertion that "Overall, 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering (employer-sponsored insurance) in the years after 2014." It was true that 30 percent of those responding to the firm's survey said they would probably stop offering health insurance once the health care law took full effect. But how likely were they to actually do that? Even McKinsey (after getting beaten badly about the head and shoulders by backers of the law) later conceded that its survey "was not intended as a predictive economic analysis of the impact of the Affordable Care Act" (Rovner, 7/29).