The re-election of President Obama nearly six months ago effectively doomed the Republicans’ last real hope of eliminating the Affordable Care Act before before it got fully implemented. It would be practically impossible to completely repeal it now. Yet on a rhetorical level the GOP refuses to acknowledge this fact.

Four years ago, the vast majority (90 percent) of students at Boston College (BC), a Catholic university, voted in favor of having access to sexual health-care education and resources, including contraceptives, on campus. We are proud to have been among the passionate group of students who led that campaign and formed the unofficial student group Boston College Students for Sexual Health (BCSSH). But we quickly learned that the university would ignore the overwhelming call for reform.

Safe Sites is one of the programs we designed to meet students’ need for sexual health care. Boston College administrators knew it existed and let it operate under the radar for years—until this month. Now, their shocking backlash against the program is inspiring news coverage around the world.

With Obamacare set to go fully into effect in less than a year, the administration is finally publicly talking about how ACA will create higher premiums for certain groups of people. From the Wall Street Journal:

Something remarkable happened yesterday. Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) decided to endorse using the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid in his state. Though he did this only after getting the administration to provide a major concession regarding how the program would be run.

If you weren’t eagerly checking the bishops’ blog for their feelings on your health insurance, you may not have known last week was Catholic Schools Week! I generally don’t participate in the bishops’ weeks (or fortnights), but I think this is an ideal moment to highlight the proud history of advocacy for contraceptive access at Catholic-affiliated Universities — which is relevant to all those lawsuits that won’t be going away now that His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan has spoken.

We begin at Notre Dame in 1966.

If you really just can’t wait to find out what President Obama is going to talk about in his State of the Union speech this evening, the best indications come from the First Lady’s guest list. Normally the President will refer to the guests during the speech to highlight a particular issue.

The problem is that the Affordable Care Act is overall a bad idea if you look at it from this lifetime perspective. Let’s even leave aside the huge issue that it does nothing to address the fact that the government allow hospitals, drug companies and doctors to charge Americans prices way above international norms.

As part of his budget proposal Governor John Kasich (R) will support taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid in Ohio. This move comes as a bit of a surprise given that Kasich as been one of the biggest opponents of Obamacare, but in the end Kasich decided the expansion was too good a deal for the state to pass up.

The one upside to the Supreme Court making the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act optional is that it has stopped the Obama administration from trying to cut it. Senior economic adviser Gene Sperling confirmed that the administration sees taking Medicaid completely of the table as necessary to make Obamacare function.

The simple fact is that every country that provides universal health care has dramatically more government regulation than our own. In general, the greater the level of regulation, the lower the overall price. On one side, you have progressives advocating adopting one of several proven solutions, and on the other side, you have people throwing around vague platitudes with no idea how to make them work