Jonathan Cohn on job No. 1: Write new rules for health insurers and make sure they follow them:
Now that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is law, the Obama administration has to translate the law’s requirements into specific rules, particularly for the health-insurance industry. The act requires insurers to do a lot of things they haven’t done before, like making sure all plans cover at least a basic array of services and limit out-of-pocket expenses. But under a so-called grandfather clause, plans already in existence are exempt from many of the new requirements. How the administration has interpreted “grandfathering” — one of its first rule-making decisions — may be an indication of things to come.