One of the biggest political question marks going into 2012 is the fate of the Affordable Health Care for America Act. Audie Cornish speaks with Noam Levey of the Los Angeles Times about what's ahead for Americans in terms of health care in the new year, including a constitutional challenge to the law's mandatory health care provision.



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$64,000
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So, if you don't require people to get insurance, there's a concern that you have no incentive to sign up when you're healthy so only the sick people sign up. If only the sick people sign up and you can sign up basically on the way to the hospital, you're not going to buy insurance. That's going to make insurance a lot more expensive for everybody. Given the health care changes that did kind of come online in 2011, did any of them save taxpayers money and is there any indication or signs that any of this legislation or any of these regulations will do so in 2012? Well, that's the $64,000 question, or maybe it's the two and a half trillion dollar question for our health care system. I think it's possibly too early to tell. There's some indication that some of the benefits that are promised by the law are having the opposite effect of in fact pushing up costs. But I think there's also some indications that some of the more underlying reforms in the way that health care's delivered by getting doctors and hospitals to work together more closely, to use information technology more efficiently, that some of those may, may have the seeds of cost saving in the future. But I think everybody realizes that no matter what the Supreme Court does next year that's a long-term project in order to make sure that costs don't continue to spiral up and out of control.