"Whiplash" is a deeply researched account of the consequences of passing the Affordable Care Act.

A rising conservative movement remains in steadfast opposition to Affordable Care and expanded coverage.

For decades, conflicts about health reform have turned into “conflicts about the meaning of America itself.”

“For fifteen dizzy years, health care shot to the center of America’s partisan wars.”

“For fifteen dizzy years, health care shot to the center of America’s partisan wars.”

The issue famously hobbled the Clinton administration and became a symbol of hope or rage across the political spectrum in all the years since. Yet the real “saga began in 2009,” write public health expert David Blumenthal and political scientist James Morone in Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science, published today, when President Barack Obama “shrugged off his advisors and spent his first fourteen months in office staggering toward the reform.”

As the tawdry business of negotiating health care turned into a national ordeal, dissected for weeks on network and cable news, the process itself “got all tangled up in the country’s discord.”

The surprisingly gripping story of how, despite these odds, the Obama administration still managed to pass—then implement—most of the measures in its Affordable Care Act is the basis for Blumenthal and Morone’s far-reaching, highly significant probing of the political and cultural ructions to come. We open to the almost-immediate rise of the Tea Party, with its fixation on “death panels” and euthanasia, and close with the most recent administration’s “war on science,” with agency paralysis, mass layoffs, and canceled research blighting even pediatric oncology. It seems fair to say that the associated rancor and extremism has lasted for years, dividing Congress, parties, and the country over each associated benefit, cost, and tradeoff.

In Whiplash, an even-handed, deeply researched account of the consequences of passing the Affordable Care Act, of making health care available to millions more Americans, Blumenthal (Professor of Public Health and Health Policy at Harvard University) and Morone (John Hazen White Professor Emeritus of Political........

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