With the midterm elections fast coming into focus, politics in Washington will remain consumed by health care for months to come. Democrats worry that the flagging support for expanding health care insurance may not recover soon enough from its botched introduction. Republicans are leaving no stone unturned in search of Obamacare horror stories to stoke further discontent. This political theater, however, has little relevance to the actual delivery of medical services. For that, the debate that matters has been taking place far from the klieg lights, in a remote courthouse in Idaho, where less than two weeks ago a district judge sided with the Federal Trade Commission and ordered the unwinding of the merger between one of the state's biggest hospital systems and its biggest independent network of doctors.
