Obamacare: The Great Experiment Begins

More than three years after President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, some of the big changes in the nation’s health-delivery system that the legislation mandated are about to go into effect. With the pro and anti forces already claiming victory, there’s a lot of misinformation going around about how the new system will operate. Critics who claimed that the reform, which ran to nearly two thousand pages, was too complicated even to get off the ground have been discredited. But big questions remain about how things will shake out.

The good news is that, in large parts of the country, there’s been substantial progress toward getting the system up and running. Last week, California, the most populous state in the country, rolled out details of its online health-insurance exchange, through which people and families without group coverage will be able to purchase individual plans.

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