Healthcare law is not one-size-fits-all, and here's why

One criticism of the Affordable Care Act is that it imposes a costly, one-size-fits-all standard, drastically increasing premiums by requiring everyone to buy health insurance that covers the same mandated benefits. This is not so. It's true that the health reform law imposes some requirements — "essential health benefits" — on what individual market and small business plans offer. But the statute left a lot of discretion to federal regulators, who, in turn, passed much of it on to states, each of which interpreted the requirements differently. And, because most plans already covered these so-called essential health benefits, the additional cost of the regulation is small.