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When the full and definitive story of the Affordable Care Act is finally written, future historians will struggle mightily to explain the Republican position — unless, that is, they are schooled in the ways and wiles of hypocrisy, gamesmanship, artifice, and revenge. Which makes it all the more fitting that the last chapter or so may tell the tale of how the GOP’s relentless and rabid assault on the law ultimately came back to bite the party in the butt. (Scot Lehigh, 3/5)

Voters on Tuesday sent several messages, including a key one about health care. Big ideas on health reform have dominated the Democratic primaries and been the focus of Congressional efforts. A “repeal and replace” effort threatened to uproot the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and turn Medicaid into lump-sum payments to states, disrupting insurance coverage for millions. Medicare for All proposals would insure nearly everyone but abolish private health insurance. Many states and the Trump administration are pursuing a lawsuit that would overturn the entire ACA, slashing public funding, while other states and candidates for president are advocating new public option insurance that could increase public funding. (Eric Schneider, 3/5)

March 2020 marks the 10th anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare. In its first decade, ObamaCare has failed to solve many of the health care problems it was supposed to address. Even worse, it has compounded many of the issues it was meant to fix — the law of unintended consequences in action. First, then-candidate Barack Obama said his namesake act would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premiums by up to $2,500 a year.”In reality, the opposite has occurred. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “premiums have doubled for individual health insurance plans since 2013, the year before many of Obamacare’s regulations and mandates took effect.” (Chris Talgo, 3/5)

When the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton first published their research on “deaths of despair” five years ago, they focused on middle-aged whites. So many white working-class Americans in their 40s and 50s were dying of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse that the overall mortality rate for the age group was no longer falling – a rare and shocking pattern in a modern society. (David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson, 3/6)