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Obamacare health exchanges that were a laughingstock a year ago are working more smoothly this enrollment period. Millions of people who could never get coverage, or faced bankrupting medical costs if they lost their jobs, now have real protection for the first time. So, after years of controversy, is the Affordable Care Act out of the woods? Hardly. Consider this the calm before the storm. Despite the recent progress, the 5-year-old law continues to face mortal danger from Congress, public opinion and the courts. (1/6)

You can't fix a fundamentally broken law; you've got to replace it. That's why Congress can't save Obamacare with a few tweaks, despite what its defenders say. No quick fix can correct the main flaw: The law takes power away from patients and hands it to bureaucrats. (Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., 1/6)

The conservative approach to keeping Americans from taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act always has featured a large element of fear-mongering. Remember the "death panels"? Sticker shock? That these things haven't come true hasn't kept congressional Republicans from conjuring up a new threat: that if the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare tax subsidies in the King vs. Halbig case, millions of Americans will face huge retroactive tax bills. (Michael Hiltzik, 1/6)

As one of its first orders of business upon convening Tuesday, the Republican House of Representatives approved a rule that will seriously undermine efforts to keep all of Social Security solvent. The rule hampers an otherwise routine reallocation of Social Security payroll tax income from the old-age program to the disability program. Such a reallocation, in either direction, has taken place 11 times since 1968, according to Kathy Ruffing of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But it's especially urgent now, because the disability program's trust fund is expected to run dry as early as next year. At that point, disability benefits for 11 million beneficiaries would have to be cut 20%. (Michael Hiltzik, 1/6)

Every piece of legislation has economic consequences. Most are small, but some are significant. When the CBO ignores them, it disregards the detrimental effects on economic growth of bad legislation as well as the positive effects on growth of good legislation. For example, when the CBO initially estimated the impact of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, it ignored any effects the law might have on gross domestic product, including job losses due to the law’s employer mandate. But these effects, detailed by Casey Mulligan in these pages in a September op-ed, “The Myth of ObamaCare’s Affordability,” are a direct cost to the economy that should have been recognized at the time the estimates were made. In February 2014, the CBO released an appendix to its original estimate acknowledging that there would be some adverse consequences for employment. (Edward P. Lazear, 1/6)

The decision by the Arizona Supreme Court that dissident legislators had standing to challenge the constitutionality of Medicaid expansion shouldn't have been a surprise. ... Nevertheless, the decision was a surprise to many and widely condemned. That illuminates a big political problem: a lack of understanding of, or appreciation for, the proper role of the judiciary in our system of government. The condemnation had the following tenor: Medicaid expansion was a good thing. Judges should not be aiding and abetting sore-loser legislators who want to overturn it. (Robert Robb, 1/6)

In his first act of 2015, California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones issued an emergency order requiring insurance companies to increase the number of primary-care doctors in their networks. That’s easier said than done. Three of the state’s nine geographic regions already lack enough primary care physicians to ensure a healthy population, according to the California Healthcare Foundation. Reforming graduate medical education — the system used to train new physicians — would help address this doctor shortage in California and across the country. The current system, established in 1965, is outdated and inefficient. Voters must urge Congress to redirect funding toward new training models that fix the shortfall and meet patients’ needs. (Barbara Ross-Lee, 1/6)

People lost their minds last fall when four people in the United States were diagnosed with Ebola. Four! Only one of the four succumbed to the devastating disease. The others were cured. Folks were calling for travel bans. They were demanding quarantines. All to protect us from a disease that could only be transmitted if one came into direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, such as vomit, blood or diarrhea. ... I’m hammering at this point because we are in the middle of a far more serious health crisis, but awareness of it is scarce. (Jonathan Capehart, 1/6)