The federal government has given more than 1,000 waivers to companies and now a waiver to keep Maine’s health insurance market from collapsing before 2014, but health care providers and consumers are stuck with more rules and complications to get simple cough medicine, writes Janet Adamy in the Wall Street Journal.

When Dianna Greer of San Diego and her son came down with a cold, she wanted a $13 bottle of NyQuil and daytime cold medicine?and she wanted to pay for it by tapping the $5,000 in her flexible-spending account.

Ms. Greer says her doctor wouldn’t write prescriptions without an office visit, so she went without the drugs. Later, she got the prescriptions from a doctor at the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.

Instead of cutting down emergency room visits, reducing bureaucracy, and simplifying life for everyone

Consumer-driven health spending accounts (HSAs and HRAs), grew from “1.2 million accounts with $835.4 million in assets” in 2006 to 5.7 million accounts with $7.7 billion in assets in 2010 according to a study by the Employment Benefits Research Institute (EBRI). That is a lot of people who have been greatly inconvenienced because of a throwaway line in the PPACA.