Nor all your piety and wit . . .

 . . . can call it back to cancel out one line,
nor all your tears wash out one word of it.

There seems to be a bit of a blogostorm going on right now over whether it was a good idea to pass the Affordable Care Act or not, either because a) we should have passed single payer instead (viz Scott Lemieux) or the president should have "focused" on the economy instead (viz. Krugzilla.)

Yeah single payer would have been nice, but the fact is, the ACA is working better than expected. The Urban Institute tells us that from the beginning of 2013 through September of this year, the number of people in the U.S. without health insurance went down by 10.6 million, and the percentage uninsured went down from 17.7% to 12.3% -- almost 1/3. Of course the improvement was bigger in the states that accepted the Medicaid expansion. And CMS is about to announce (at 4:00 pm today) that the growth in health care spending remains low, and was in fact lower last year than in 2012.

So continued Republican efforts to demonize the bill and take health insurance away from people are just evil. However, the corporate media are going along with the gag, and the bill remains unpopular, even though people are overwhelmingly in favor of everything that's in it. What a world.

Update: Here's the link to the CMS report on health care costs, no longer growing faster than GDP. This, for now, means the crisis people in the health care policy field have been panicking over for 15 years isn't happening after all. (Ditto for the "out of control" federal budget deficit, these two facts being more or less the same.)