At the moment, the hot issue of the 2012 presidential campaign is Medicare, with the Obama and Romney campaigns trading charges and counter-charges over the health-insurance program for the elderly. Since we at the Prospect love clarifying the muddy and making the complex understandable, we thought we'd unpack the arguments the two sides are making and provide some context so we can all grasp this a bit better. We'll start with the campaigns' claims.

Does Mitt Romney actually want to "end Medicare as we know it"?

That's the charge Democrats are now making; here's a video the Obama campaign just released:

This November, voters in Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have the chance to do something radical: legalize marijuana for recreational use. In all three states, activists secured enough petition signatures to place initiatives on the ballot to essentially treat cannabis like alcohol, regulating its distribution and taxing it. The three states already allow patients with ailments like cancer and AIDS to use marijuana; Colorado allows dispensaries, which make for a bigger and broader semi-decriminalized system. But if these initiatives pass, they would be the first allowing anyone who doesn't have (or claim to have) a medical need to use marijuana.

Texas has a higher proportion of its population living without health insurance than any other state. But like many other states with lots of poor people, it has the misfortune of being governed by Republicans, which explains why yesterday, Governor Rick Perry announced that the state will refuse to accept the money the federal government is offering to expand Medicaid eligibility to everyone who makes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Perry says that this expansion of Medicaid, which is almost entirely paid for by the federal government, will nevertheless bankrupt the state and put the oppressive boot on the necks of Texans. So he's happy to keep 25 percent of his population uninsured.

In case you're wondering, Texas currently sets eligibility for Medicaid at 26 percent of the federal poverty level, which means that if you earn more than $6,000 a year for a family of four, you're not eligible. That's not a typo. Six thousand dollars a year for a family of four is what the state of Texas considers too rich to get on Medicaid. Look down the list of eligibility levels, and you find that only Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and Louisiana set their eligibility lower. It is just so weird how those poor Southern states are the stingiest with health care benefits, isn't it?

It's possible that eventually, Texas and the other states will come around to the expansion of Medicaid. Sarah Kliff explains how this happened with Medicaid's enactment in the 1960s and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in the 1990s; conservatives initially resisted, but the money and the opportunity to insure their population eventually became irresistable. One of the key factors then and now is the presence of organized, influential interest groups—particularly the hospitals that have to deliver uncompensated care to the uninsured, costing them billions—that can exert their influence on the government's decisions.

But the Republicans who resisted and then gave in were different from the Republicans of today, and this will be a test of just how far they'll go to make a statement about their hatred of the federal government in general and their hatred of Barack Obama in particular. Today's Republicans are the ones who would turn down a deal offering ten dollars of spending cuts for one dollar of tax increases. But that was a hypothetical question, and this question is very real. There are actual human beings whose lives are at stake. I'd love to hear someone ask Rick Perry this question: Which do you think is worse, someone living without health insurance, or someone getting health insurance through a government program? I'm not sure what he'd say, but his actions say quite clearly that he'd prefer that the person have no health insurance. Of course, we're not talking about him personally, or his kids, or anybody he knows having to go without insurance. We're talking about poor people. So screw them.

The verdict of the Supreme Court upholding nearly all of the Affordable Care Act is a victory to be savored in the full knowledge that it may be only temporary and includes potentially damaging changes in constitutional interpretation.

It is a victory, first of all, for the millions of people excluded from health insurance who stand to gain protection despite their medical history or low incomes.

It is a victory for the rule of law in the face of a group of partisan conservative justices who want to immobilize federal power in social policy.

It is a victory for the millions of people who have struggled for decades to achieve equal access to health care.

As the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act worked their way up to the Supreme Court, I always found the challenge to the expansion of Medicaid to be the strangest part. Quick context: the program provides insurance for poor people, splitting the cost between the federal government and the states. But the current rules say that each state gets to set its own eligibility standards, which meant that if you live in a state run by Democrats and you're poor, you can get Medicaid, but if you live in a state run by Republicans, you have to be desperately poor to get Medicaid. For instance, in Mississippi, a family of four has to have a yearly gross income below a princely $9,828 to qualify. Because if a family is living high on the hog with their $10,000 a year, they aren't really poor, right?

Fortunately, the Affordable Care Act fixed this, by changing Medicaid so that everyone with up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level ($30,657 for a family of four) would qualify. And to make things easier on the states, the bill provided that the federal government would pick up almost all of the tab. The federal government pays 100 percent of the cost of paying for the new enrollees through 2016, 95 percent in 2017, 94 percent in 2018, 93 percent in 2019, and 90 percent from then on. In other words, the federal government is saying to states, "Here's a bunch of free money to insure a whole lot of your citizens, which will make them healthier and more productive." And almost every state run by Republicans replied, "How dare you do such a thing to us! It's unconstitutional! We're suing!"

In tomorrow's New York Times, Annie Lowrey has an interesting story about a study researchers were able to do in Oregon when the state had to hold a lottery to give people Medicaid coverage, leading to the perfect conditions for a randomized field experiment on what effect obtaining insurance could have. The results were pretty encouraging:

In a continuing study, an all-star group of researchers following Ms. Parris and tens of thousands of other Oregonians has found that gaining insurance makes people healthier, happier and more financially stable...

Paul Ryan's budget has become a rallying cry for Democrats, and President Obama's re-election in particular. Republicans have long expressed an antipathy for the general concept of government services, but these were often expressed in the abstract or lone exceptions, with the party generally focusing on the starve-the-beast philosophy of reducing taxes so that government outlays would eventually have to be reduced. Ryan's budget gets that down on paper in crystallized form, codifying those ideas into a specific vision for the future that would gut all government services except health spending, Social Security, and an increased budget for defense, discarding the rest of discretionary spending.