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President Obama faces a divided Washington, and any legislation he enacts in the next two years will have to be approved by the Republican-controlled House and overcome filibuster threats
from the Senate's GOP minority. But just by winning a second term, Obama "cements his signature law — ObamaCare — in American history," says Diane Stafford in The Kansas City Star. The
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act survived a Supreme Court challenge and Mitt Romney's vow to repeal it "on Day One" of his presidency, and now even House Speaker John Boehner
(R-Ohio) admits that "ObamaCare is the law of the land." But it's not quite that simple. Between the reams of unwritten rules and guidelines and antagonistic governors, a lot of ObamaCare is
up in the air before it fully kicks in in 2014.
The patchwork of employer-supported private insurance policies and government programs that make up the U.S. health care system is far from perfect — only 15 percent of U.S. doctors think
America's system "works well," according to a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund. And doctors' job satisfaction is the lowest among the 10 industrialized nations polled, even though
American doctors make way more money than their peers abroad. At the same time, by every measure, the U.S. spends much more on health care than any other developed nation, and in most cases
gets less-than-average health outcomes.
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