The Hill’s Sam Baker pulls out this nugget from the latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll:

People seem to be forgetting what the healthcare reform law does, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The monthly tracking poll found a sharp decline in the number of people who are aware that the new law will offer financial help to people who must buy insurance on their own, rather than getting it from an employer. Last summer, 72 percent of those polled were aware of that benefit. Now it’s down to 58 percent.

Fewer than half of the respondents knew the law expands Medicaid, down from two-thirds just over a year ago. Only 29 percent knew that the law eliminates cost-sharing for some preventive services, and half said the law did not provide that benefit.

When all you hear about are the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of reform and fear-mongering about increased costs and erosion of coverage, naturally you’d be reluctant to support reform. Which is why Nancy Pelosi’s now infamous statement — “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” — may not be the most eloquently expressed sentiment, but remains true: the real test of the measure’s support will come once it is implemented and Americans actually experience its benefits.

The same, by the way, holds for all of the employer surveys about dumping coverage. Asking businesses what they’ll do about a provision that doesn’t go into effect until 2014 today — when some 40 percent are unfamiliar with its details — is just begging for the worst-case scenario that’s grounded in rumors about “big government regulation” than any serious consideration of the actual provisions in the text of the law.

Last month, a federal judge blocked Kansas from enforcing a state law imposing overly rigorous licensing standards on abortion providers pending the resolution of a lawsuit filed by two doctors who perform abortions in the state. Attorneys representing the Kansas abortion providers are alleging that officials drafted the regulations “without independently compiling data or studies on how the new rules would make the procedures safer for the women seeking them,” but they may have a hard time proving their point, since the state is now “battling to keep from revealing details about how it developed” the new rules:

Lawyers for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the attorney general want to prevent two abortion clinics from learning how the rules were crafted, as well as the mind-set behind them, according to their court filings.

They are asking a judge to limit the scope of what is shared with the clinics’ lawyers to prevent overly broad requests that don’t lead to relevant evidence, the court documents say.

The state also has denied open-records requests from The Kansas City Star and The Associated Press, which asked for documents that could have shed light on the drafting of the rules.

The licensing rules — which are far more stringent and specific than what the state currently requires of hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers — established new standards for exits, lighting, bathrooms, and equipment and would allow the states to fine clinics or go to court to shut them down. The state had initially denied licenses to two of the three abortion providers, but all are now operating until the lawsuit against the regulations is resolved.

The public timeline suggests that the new rules — which are only a small part of Kansas’ effort to eradicate abortion in the state and create a direct court challenge to Roe v. Wade — were issued hastily with little time to study their effectiveness or need. The state legislature passed the standards in April and Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) signed it into law on May 16. Kansas’ Department of Health and Environment issued the final version on June 17 and informed clinics that they would have to comply with the rules by July 1.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has identified the Affordable Care Act’s so-called grandfather rules — that exempt health insurance plans in existence before the law went into effect from many of the new benefits standards and consumer protections that new plans now have to abide by — as one of 10 job destroying regulations Republicans will try to repeal as they “continue to focus on the jobs crisis”:

Grandfathered Health Plans (November/December): We all remember when President Obama promised Americans that if they liked their health care plan they could keep it. Now, the Obama Administration has been issuing further restrictions against those previously protected plans. The result, by the Administration’s own estimates, will be a loss of 49 to 80 percent of small employer plans, 34 to 64 percent of large employer plans, and 40 to 67 percent of individual insurance plans. Meanwhile, employers losing their grandfathered status will face steep penalties, increasing their costs and negatively affecting wages and job growth. The Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Workforce committees will soon be working on legislation to repeal these ObamaCare restrictions.

Conservatives love to use Obama’s “keep your coverage” statement against him, but realistically employers change their health care plans all the time — they did before reform and will continue to do so after. What the administration has tried to do is discourage employers and insurers from avoiding the standards in the law and dramatically changing their plans: cutting benefits, raising co-pays, or lowering the employer contribution.

Employers can make some changes — but they don’t have a blank check to increase costs and reduce benefits. In fact, HHS has loosened these regulations, not tightened them. On Nov. 15, 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services accepted employers’ concerns and updated the rules to allow more plans to keep their grandfather status. Under the original regulation, for instance, some group insurance plans would have been penalized for making small administrative changes, but the updated standards allowed “plans to switch insurance companies and shop for the same coverage at a lower cost while maintaining their grandfathered status.”

Eventually, most plans will lose these protections — and that’s a good thing. The whole point of grandfather rules is to serve as a bridge to gradually move everyone into plans that are required to meet a basic floor of standards. The GOP’s effort to repeal the rules would allow carriers and employers to drastically change their plans and deny insured beneficiaries the benefit of the law’s new consumer protections.

This Thursday marks the beginning of Texas’ new fiscal year, and with it a slew of conservative legislation signed by Gov. Rick Perry (R) takes effect.

Among those laws is the highly controversial sonogram law Perry signed in May, forcing pregnant women seeking abortions to undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound at least 24 hours before an abortion and to hear a description of the fetus:

One new law requires a doctor to attempt to show a woman seeking an abortion a sonogram of the fetus, to describe the image and to provide the sound of the fetal heartbeat before the procedure. Federal Judge Sam Sparks is expected to rule before Thursday on a challenge to the law by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

“This law is intrusive, patronizing to women and unconstitutional,” said Julie Rikelman, the center’s lead attorney on the case. She said patients should be given only the information and medical tests appropriate for the circumstances and that a doctor should not have to act as a “government agent.”

The sonogram law is a transparent attempt by anti-abortion activists to chip away at women’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy. The Senate sponsor of the bill, Dan Patrick (R) hailed it as “the beginning of the end for abortions,” and said he was so proud that he was “inspired to wear my cowboy hat” when Perry signed the bill.

Perry, a self-described “small government” conservative, has no problem inserting the government between women and their doctors. Facing the state’s worst budget crisis in modern history, he dubbed the sonogram bill an “emergency priority” that allowed the legislature to expedite its passage. Texas conservatives initially refused to include exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and fetal abnormality in the bill.

In the last legislative session, Perry also approved drastic cuts of $74 million to family planning services in Texas, which experts say will result in tens of thousands of additional unwanted pregnancies in coming years. The cuts could also result in 180,000 Texans losing access to cancer screenings and basic contraception.

On Friday, Virginia state health officials released draft regulations requiring existing state abortion providers to meet the physical plant requirements of hospitals. The new rules — the result of a TRAP (Targeted Regulations Against Abortion Providers) law passed by the General Assembly this spring — threaten to shut down Virginia’s abortion clinics, which only handle first-trimester abortions and are currently subject to the same regulations as physician practices.

The draft guidelines were formulated through an ‘emergency’ process that bypasses the normal public notice and rely on standards that were only “intended for brand new construction in the process of being built,” not existing clinics for whom compliance would be completely cost prohibitive. From the Virginia Coalition to Protect Women’s Health:

In particular, the draft regulations require existing women’s health centers in Virginia to meet extensive, significant physical plant requirements found in the 2010 Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities – including Guidelines for Outpatient Surgical Facilities, otherwise called ambulatory surgical facilities. These Guidelines are intended for brand new construction in the process of being built. These standards were never intended for existing health care structures and are not intended to apply to office-based surgical procedures. By relying on the 2010 Guidelines and imposing them on existing structures, the Virginia Department of Health would force substantial architectural changes by women’s health centers in order to be in compliance. Rather than protect women’s health, the regulations could endanger women because they could limit access to safe abortion by driving legitimate providers out of practice, which could place the health of women in Virginia in jeopardy.

The proposal also “allows the state’s health commissioner to suspend or revoke a clinic’s license, requires that a facility has an infection prevention plan and mandates that anesthesia be administered by a doctor.” The state’s Board of Health will vote on the rules on Sept. 15 and they will go into effect on Dec. 31. These “emergency rules will remain in effect while permanent regulations are crafted.”

Meanwhile, it is already difficult to access abortion services in the Commonwealth, “with 86 percent of Virginia’s counties lacking any abortion providers at all.”