�鶹Ů��

Hillary Rodham Clinton, as she offered up a sheaf of new health care proposals, said she was “building on the Affordable Care Act.” But lurking in those proposals was a veiled criticism of President Obama’s signature domestic achievement: For many families, the Affordable Care Act has not made health care affordable. Mr. Obama has spent five years minimizing cost issues still confronting many health care consumers. Mrs. Clinton is taking those on without apologies. She would go beyond the president’s 2010 law, capping a patient’s share of the bill for doctor visits and prescription drugs. She would repeal the law’s planned tax on high-cost employer-sponsored insurance — a tax the White House says is needed to constrain the growth of health spending. (Pear, 10/6)

With the first primaries of the 2016 presidential campaign just months away, the national healthcare debate is poised to enter a new phase, more focused on consumers’ pocketbooks than on re-litigating the 5-year-old Affordable Care Act. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is campaigning on a detailed program to crack down on rising drug prices and runaway medical bills, is making a play for the hearts of voters increasingly irritated about what they have to pay for healthcare. In the process, Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has issued an implicit challenge to her Republican rivals, who continue to campaign with broadsides against Obamacare but few details about how they would address consumers’ basic healthcare worries. (Levey, 10/7)

It sounds like a politician's dream: a machine that can tell you exactly what to say to change a voter's mind. Well, that's what a political scientist has come up with — at least, a first tentative step in that direction. Using text from a pro-Obamacare website and testing different combinations of sentences on volunteers, an algorithm created by Northeastern University assistant professor Nick Beauchamp was able to identify optimally persuasive terms that make people more inclined to support the landmark health care law. Sentences including words like "pre-existing," "condition," "coverage" tended to leave study volunteers feeling more positive about the law. "States," "federal" and "government" were among the topics that turned people off Obamacare. (Detrow, 10/6)

A dozen years before running for governor in New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan got her start in public service at the invitation of then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, the woman she now hopes to serve alongside in the U.S. Senate. A lawyer at the time, Hassan caught Shaheen's eye for her advocacy work on behalf of children with disabilities, including her son Ben. Now 27, Ben was born with cerebral palsy and cannot walk or speak. Hassan believed he and children like him should have the same access as any child to a good education — and she fought for it. ... Now in her second, two-year term, Hassan's aiming higher: On Monday, she announced she'll challenge Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte in what is likely to be one of country's most expensive and closely watched contests as the two parties vie for control of the Senate. (Ronayne, 10/6)