Maybe Republicans aren't so opposed to health care reform after all. After grandstanding against the Affordable Care Act for the past few years, Republicans aren't ready to let the entire bill die should the Supreme Court overturn the law later this summer. Congressional Republicans are crafting a contingency plan to reinstate some of the popular elements of the bill in that scenario, according to Politico. It's a clear indication that the GOP has learned the same lesson as Democrats: while the all-encompassing idea of Obamacare may fair poorly in the polls, voters typically support individual elements of the bill.
The wise Harold Pollack has argued that health care reform is in some ways the best covered social policy story in the history of American journalism. That isn't to say there hasn't been plenty of crappy coverage, but there has never been the same volume of informed and insightful reporting and analysis available in so many places on a pressing policy debate.
And yet it's easy to get depressed about the impact all that good work didn't have...
You don't have to expect every politician to be a serious policy wonk to believe that he or she ought to have a grasp of at least the basics of the key issues they debate. And if they don't have that grasp at the beginning of a debate, then they ought to by the end of it. If there's one thing we can say about the last year, it's that we all learned a lot about health-care policy. Or at least most of us did.
Howard Dean's "kill the bill" assault on the Senate health reform bill isn't justified, at least by his own standards a few months ago. The main attack Dean has volleyed against the current bill is that it lacks either a public option or a Medicare buy-in. That part is consistent with what he's said all year. But Tuesday night on MSNBC and yesterday morning on CNBC, Dean said the bill is not even "insurance [regulation] reform":
