Confusion hangs over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the haze will take months to clear. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a key component, the individual mandate, at the end of March. Once there’s a ruling, we can begin to predict the consequences for the law’s many tangled tributaries. Whatever conclusions the judges reach, I believe there are three principles so solid that they can’t be chipped away in partisan debate. Indeed, they’d have the power to transform health care if patients, doctors, payers and politicians agreed to keep them front of mind. None of the principles is the least bit complicated or slippery – yet, somehow, they recede from view whenever tempers flare:
