The following appeared in a Chicago Tribune editorial:
House Speaker John Boehner is catching a little heat for making fun of his fellow Republicans' reluctance to deal with immigration reform. "Here's the attitude: 'Ohhh. Don't make me do this. Ohhh. This is too hard,'" he told a Rotary Club in Ohio.
"They'll take the path of least resistance," Boehner said.
That's some welcome truth-telling from the speaker. He relayed another political truth at the Ohio event: Congress is not going to repeal Obamacare.
"(To) repeal Obamacare isn't the answer. The answer is repeal and replace. The challenge is that Obamacare is the law of the land. It is there and it has driven all types of changes in our health care delivery system. You can't re-create an insurance market over night."
Boehner has a sound message there for Republicans and Democrats. Obamacare is not going to vanish. It does need to be recalibrated to let insurance and health care markets function.
When President Barack Obama recently declared that 8 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, he admonished Republican lawmakers to stop talking about repeal of the law and move on. "This thing is working," he said. "The repeal debate is, and should be, over. We've been having a political fight about this for five years. We need to move on to something else."
So he and Boehner seem to agree that repeal isn't in the cards.
That part about "moving on," though. That's just Democrats' wishful thinking.
People understand the Affordable Care Act has deep-seated problems. The RealClearPolitics average of seven recent polls on Obamacare found 41.3 percent of the public supports the law and 52.7 percent opposes it. That's going to be a factor in the midterm elections.
That points to why the congressional debate over an Obamacare overhaul is gaining momentum among Republicans and Democrats. There are still plenty of questions, plenty of doubts.
The White House announced that 28 percent of enrollees on the federal marketplaces were ages 18 to 34. That's a good sign for the future of Obamacare. Insurers need a heavy dose of healthy people paying premiums to offset the costs of sicker people. If not, premiums rocket and the law totters.
However, many insurers had hoped for higher numbers of healthier people; closer to 40 percent of the overall pool. That has prompted projections of a major premium increase next year, on top of premium spikes many consumers saw this year. Some insurers have warned of double-digit rate increases next year.
The debate on Obamacare is far from over. The country needs Republicans and Democrats to work together on loosening the mandates and restrictions to tame premium increases and give consumers and insurers flexibility to buy and sell the coverage people want and can afford.