In the first of a new series of blog posts called "Reflecting on Health Reform," David Blumenthal, M.D., looks back at the tumultuous first weeks of the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansion provisions. The Commonwealth Fund's president concludes that while the problems with the federal insurance marketplace website are serious, the law also survived a political attempt to kill it, making it not such a bad couple of weeks for the supporters of health reform, after all.
"Technologically, getting the exchanges to function is ultimately doable," he says. "Politically, taking health insurance away from millions of Americans is akin to defying the laws of gravity."