Less than a month before the midterm elections, candidates of both parties seem to have found something on which they can agree: There’s no sense in trying to defend Obamacare as it was passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. Instead, the debate over the federal health care overhaul has devolved into a contest between two opposing positions, staked out (for example) in one Senate race by candidates Rand Paul (R., Ky.) and Jack Conway (D., Ky.) and aptly characterized by Conway on Fox News Sunday: “I’d like to fix [Obamacare], and [Paul] wants to repeal it.”  

The fact that we’ve gotten to this point is quite telling. When President Obama signed Obamacare into law on March 23, he wasn’t predicting that a debate over fixing versus repealing would characterize the lead-up to the November 2 midterm election.  Yet, just a few months after the law’s passage and more than three years before it would be implemented in any meaningful degree, even Obamacare’s supporters are granting that it’s broken.  (If not, why the need to “fix” it?)