In today’s Washington Post, columnist Bob Samuelson writes:

Then there’s the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a body of 15 experts charged with limiting Medicare spending if it passes certain targets. But the law handcuffs IPAB. It can’t increase patient cost-sharing, restrict benefits, modify eligibility requirements or — in any one year — cut spending by more than 1.5 percent, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation.

All four of those assertions about supposed limitations on IPAB’s powers are false, as Diane Cohen and I explain here.

The Washington Post reports:

The Supreme Court may have declared that the government can order Americans to get health insurance, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to sign up.

Nowhere is that more evident than Oklahoma, a conservative state with an independent streak and a disdain for the strong arm of government…

When it comes to health insurance, the effort to sign people up isn’t likely to get much help from the state. Antipathy toward President Obama’s signature health-care overhaul runs so deep that when the federal government awarded Oklahoma a large grant to plan for the new law, the governor turned away the money — all $54 million of it.

The idea that the federal government will persuade reluctant people here to get insurance elicited head-shaking chuckles at Cattlemen’s Steakhouse…

But some in Oklahoma aren’t so sure the population here will be easy to persuade, especially if the state government continues to condemn “Obamacare.”

“If we’re not being cooperative and all the rhetoric is hostile, then that’s going to be a real barrier to providing information to people,” said David Blatt, director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a state policy think tank. “There’s a lot of important outreach that needs to happen before January 1, 2014, and it’s going to be extremely difficult to do that when you have state leaders standing there saying, ‘Over our dead bodies.’ ”

Resistance remains strong in other states as well, with some governors promising to opt out of parts of the law.

Wait until states find out that they can block ObamaCare’s employer mandate just by refusing to create an Exchange.

I’m a bit late to this party, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) was of course right to tell Fox News’ Chris Wallace last weekend that the federal government should not pursue universal coverage:

Wallace: In your replacement [for ObamaCare], how would you provide universal coverage?

McConnell: Well, first let me say the single best thing we can do for the American health care system is to get rid of ObamaCare…

Wallace: But if I may sir, you talk about “repeal and replace.” How would you provide universal coverage?

McConnell: …We need to go step by step to replace it with more modest reforms…that would deal with the principal issue, which is cost…

Wallace: …What specifically are you going to do to provide universal coverage to the 30 million people who are uninsured?

McConnell: That is not the issue. The question is, how can you go step by step to improve the American health care system…

Wallace: …If you repeal ObamaCare, how would you protect those people with pre-existing conditions?

McConnell: …That’s the kind of thing that ought to be dealt with at the state level…

Naturally, the Church of Universal Coverage caught the vapors. But Time’s Mark Halperin says McConnell’s stance, while embarrassing, is “not a politically dangerous place to be”:

McConnell would have seemed less evasive and could have stopped Wallace in his tracks had he said, “We will not pursue universal coverage because that causes more people–not fewer–to fall through the cracks in our health care sector.”