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Public opinion about the Affordable Care Act is consistently favorable and on an upswing. Faced with the prospect of repeal, crowds of constituents are confronting lawmakers across the country to express their anguish in town halls. But still, Republicans are rushing to rip apart the health insurance coverage that millions of people depend on. (Topher Spiro, 3/3)

The debate over the future of Obamacare is taking place in secret meetings among Republican lawmakers. President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan have promised to bring forward a bill to modify the law soon. But before they do, they have to work out disagreements among their colleagues on the best way to proceed. (Margot Sanger-Katz, 3/6)

In the beginning, God created a health-care system. But she quickly found it to be a thankless and terribly complex endeavor, so she decided to create the heavens and the Earth. The Earth was covered in darkness, so she said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. “That was easy,” she thought, so she decided to go back to health care. (Jared Bernstein, 3/6)

Say what you will about Obamacare, the law has been a godsend for people with serious medical conditions who had been unable to find or afford coverage in the individual market. (3/5)

High-risk pools can help transition to a system that makes high-quality medical care affordable and secure for patients with high-cost conditions. Obamacare is utterly failing in this regard. And while congressional Republicans are eyeing state-run high-risk pools, their approach is also woefully inadequate. (Michael F. Cannon, 3/5)

President Donald Trump's core principles for health care include ensuring that Americans with pre-existing conditions have access to coverage, and that Americans should be able to purchase the health insurance plan they want, not one forced on them by the government. Each of these goals is laudable and achievable, taken separately. But President Trump and others are about to confront what others have learned the hard way: Achieving both goals simultaneously is extremely challenging. (Seth Chandler, 3/6)

As to consumers — Californians would need to be wary of buying insurance from firms based in states with weak consumer protections. California has some of the toughest protections for patients in the nation, and it can still be difficult to hold insurers to their promises. Good luck trying to convince a company in some far-flung state that it can’t, say, arbitrarily refuse to pay for treatment a patient was led to believe would be covered. (3/4)

The current Republican “plan” for replacing the ACA (aka “Obamacare,” aka “Romneycare”) fails on almost every point. Where there’s plenty of room to fix problems that do exist within the current system, GOP leadership instead aims to add to them, tenfold. The ACA’s subsidies, which expand as incomes decline, would be replaced instead by a system of fixed tax credits that increase only with a person’s age, regardless of income. Essentially, it would kill one of the fundamental underpinnings that allows the ACA to work at all: the individual mandate. (Emily Mills, 3/4)