It's been a little more than five months since President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- aka, health reform -- into law. Following are some of the topics that the media have spotlighted from the 2,000-plus pages of legislation (and the thousands of pages of rules and regs that will be propagated by the law).

• Lawsuits filed by numerous states challenging the law's constitutionality.
• Why should everyone pay for the poor lifestyle choices of others?
• The billions to be spent hiring more IRS agents and fraud investigators, as well as the billions spent in creating new state and federal bureaucracies.
• What's meaningful -- remote home monitoring -- vs. what's down in the weeds -- menu ingredients.
• Governments closing, selling their public hospitals because they're already under water and the new electronic medical records and other upgrades will kill them off.
• Where will the moral/spiritual convictions of some care givers collide with mandates of the law?
• Shortages of doctors, inpatient hospital beds; education cuts that crimp the pipeline of new nurses, pharmacists, techs.
• The pending war between insurers and hospitals.
• The fact that Congressional Budget Office estimates are often off the mark.
• Explosion of two-tier medicine -- "concierge" docs for those that can afford them vs. docs for the rest of us, if they'll have us.
• More docs refusing to see Medicare, Medi-Cal patients.
• The 50-worker threshold on employers needing to provide insurance will curtail business growth. And the fact that employers are already dumping insurance or insurers are raising premiums in anticipation of the law, which will unfold more intensely by 2014.
• Health care fatigue -- been talked to death so let's just forget about reform for a while.
• What's going to happen to insurance salesmen  -- commissions fading away?
• Making insurance virtually universal -- will it dry up the labor market as people won't be hard-pressed looking for work?
• If companies will save money on insurance, will that mean they'll pay their workers more -- and the Social Security funding will last longer than estimates?

For one source of reader-friendly information on the law, check out the Kaiser Family Foundation website: http://healthreform.kff.org/

Credit the Wall Street Journal for these tidbits from recent days:

• Unspent stimulus money: $39.48 billion appropriated for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, of which 23% or roughly $8.89 billion has been paid out. (For health care info technology for hospitals and doctors, $1.7 billion was awarded but only $27.2 million paid so far. It takes a looong time to write all those regs!)
• Workplace fatalities: Deaths due to workplace injuries fell to a historic low in 2009 at 4,340, the Labor Department reported, a dip of 17% from the previous year. A bad economy meant fewer risky construction jobs and a decline in highway fatalities (882). Most dangerous jobs: fishing-related (200 deaths per 100,000 workers) logging (61.8) and airplane pilots/flight engineers (57.1). (Kind of explains those Discovery and other cable channel reality shows.)
• Bad to worse: In 2005, the city of Buena Vista, Va., pledged its city hall and police station to refinance a $9.2 million public golf course. Now the city of 6,500 people is in default and may lose those buildings. (Proving not all boneheads live in the Golden State.)
• Children of illegal immigrants: 1 in 12 babies born in the U.S. in 2008 was born to illegal immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. Undocumented residents represented 4% of the population but accounted for 8% of all births in the U.S. in 2008. (That was front-page news to the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch.)
• Quote of the day: "We never don't know anything about someone." -- John Nardone, chief executive of an Internet data mining company known as [x+1] Inc.

Have trouble remembering your spouse's birthday? Well, how well do you know the prescriptions and over-the-counter medications they take? Surgeries, which leg and when? Food allergies? If the world went to heck, do you know what their final wishes are?

We keep a red folder -- red because it says "urgent."  It has been invaluable after calling an ambulance to know where that folder is -- and to grab it. I take the information with me when I travel.

We update it regularly, because life changes. If my blood pressure goes down, I downsize my dosages (working with my doc).

The folder includes -- a list of surgeries, injuries, findings of significant medical events, dates and doctors involved. It includes lists of prescribed medications -- dosages, etc. What kinds of vitamins and supplements we take. What foods (cinnamon, ginger), medications (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories) and items (laytex bandages) might cause us problems.

And it includes a signed advanced directive.

Some people have found it useful to put a "red folder" onto their flash drives or on some paid Internet site. I've heard some horror stories of data filching, and some tales of doctors/clinics saying they have to write everything down -- no gizmos. That will change in some more secure, IT nirvana of the future.

But for now, if you're not already doing it, why aren't you in possession of a "red folder"? And for those who are, what more do you think I should have in mine?

I was pretty proud of myself, having hiked stem to stern, knocking neither my shins nor my head and seated myself in the captain's chair on the bridge of the USS Midway in San Diego.

Then I met a guy who flew some of the military aircraft aboard the floating museum -- Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, who managed to safely land his passenger jet, with 155 aboard, in the Hudson River in January 2009.

He was keynote speaker -- replacing former VP Al Gore who "satellited in" his address later -- to roughly a thousand attendees at the American Hospital Association health forum and leadership summit.

Sully wondered why the "Miracle on the Hudson" was such a big deal, answering his own question by saying that with the recession under way, with greed and self-interest in the media spotlight, what happened that day was life-affirming, a call to extraordinary acts of good, of discipline and determined training.

And it was one heckuva story. After a audio recording of the incident was played, Sully's US Airways plane having had both engines shut down because of an encounter with birds, he talked about "enforcing calm" on himself, uttering few words but words like "my plane" -- meaning he had control. About how his blood pressure and pulse rate spiked and stayed high for weeks. About teamwork, even though this was the first flight he had with First Officer Jeffrey Skiles -- who'd responded "your plane" to Sully's comment.

And he married the aviation and medical cultures, as many former pilots have done to show how hard-wiring best practices and procedures can avoid bad outcomes. About removing the atmosphere where a few docs/pilots regard themselves as gods or cowboys whose decisions are above question.

"Live your life like your values are apparent," he said. Let the surprises be hard, but let the routine things be easy. Human memory is not infallible, he said. "Safety is too important to be managed by exception. We simply can't live long enough to make all the mistakes ourselves."

I don't recall him fumbling, needing a sip of water or being anything less than transparent during his 45-minute presentation and subsequent Q/A. The only time I saw him bite his lip and, just for a second, look ill at ease was when he recalled having to speak at a friend's funeral months after his January 2009 heroism. When he took the microphone at the service, he simply introduced himself as "Chris's friend."

When investigators asked whether he would have done anything different in the 208 seconds between hitting the birds and skidding along the frigid Hudson, he said no, nothing really. To which his First Officer Skiles retorted: "I'd have done it in July."