Health care attorney and Galen Institute trustee John Hoff has just completed an extraordinarily thorough and scholarly legal analysis of the Patients' Bill of Rights, legislation that currently is under consideration by a House-Senate conference committee. The paper, entitled "The Patient's Bill of Rights: A Prescription for Massive Federal Regulation," was published this week by The Heritage Foundation. In the paper, Hoff:

• describes in detail how the bill would lead to an explosion of costly litigation and impose highly intrusive federal regulation on private health plans and health care delivery.

• describes how a bill designed "to restrict the operations of managed care plans...may in fact result in the destruction of fee-for-service health care."

• explains how employers who provide health care benefits would be unable to escape the risk of devastating litigation.

Hoff quotes a Harris Interactive study, which found that as many as 15.4 million Americans could lose their health coverage if this bill passes. The legislation, he writes, "will result in a staggering amount of new red tape for American doctors, insurers, employers, and patients...In the name of patient protection, Congress is poised to make the problems in America's current health care system even worse."