"The election is over. Now what? What are the next steps when it comes to health care reform? Just what did the people say November 2?

As you would expect there is no agreed answers. Republicans say this election was about health care. Tea Party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, said on NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend. “We have to stop the funding of Obamacare and over the next two years show the American people what the real options are to improve the system we have now.”

But President Barack Obama, In his news conference said, “I think we’d be misreading the election if we thought that the American people want to see us for the next two years relitigate arguments that we had over the last two years.”

The polls are interesting. The Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed the surveys. “Over the course of the past month, at least eight well-respected polls have asked Americans whether they support the idea of repealing health reform, and” Kaiser reports, “responses have been all over the map, ranging from a high of 51 percent in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll to a low of 26 percent in our September Kaiser Health Tracking survey. Why the wide range? After a close look at the data collected below, our take is that question wording is driving the differences. At the same time, recent polling suggests that for at least some Americans, a vote for repeal means a vote to eliminate certain provisions of the health reform law while also keeping many of its benefits, rather than representing a desire to overturn the law completely. “

But the political divide remains stark. So we are going to (as the president puts it) relitigate the health care law."

Get the Story:
Bring it on! Relitigating the health care reform debate (Mark Trahant 11/9)

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